I think it almost irrefutable that in the final analysis the power of government rests on its ability to inflict or credibly threaten violence. The capacity of the state to collect taxes and enforce its laws ultimately depends on its capacity to send scary people to your home, smash down your door, seize your property and deprive you of your liberty. The many intermediate stages such as official letters, court dates and so on between ultimate cause (nonpayment of taxes) and ultimate effect (dragged from your home in handcuffs) don't change this fact one iota and the relationship between citizen and state will always be defined by the latter's greater capacity for force.
I would regard this as true whether the state in question is a liberal democracy or a tyrannical dictatorship.
Furthermore the frequency with which the last resort is employed is also immaterial. No country has used nuclear weapons since 1945 but to claim that their existence has not influenced the course of subsequent history is absurd.
My own libertarianism stems in large part from my belief that violence and the threat of it are things to be used only as a last resort. People who decide upon the rates and the allocation of taxation should ask themselves if the things they are spending money on are so critically important to the health of the nation that they justify the threat of violence involved in its collection.
May 18, 2009
March 11, 2009
Status displays, and authenticity.
The day before yesterday, I was drinking with my girlfriend in a winebar about thirty seconds from our home. This wine bar, whose utterly forgettable name is nowhere to be seen on the shop front, is a standing room only place. Everyone is huddled around the rectangular counter so drinking there has a a cosy communal feel.
On this occasion we found ourselves next to two middle aged Americans, in their mid to late forties.
A man and a woman, both were attractive, and dressed with the kind of slovenly elegance, popular among creative marketing types and the more dapper members of academia.
As my girlfriend was munching her excellent Tomato spaghetti I overheard much of their conversation. It was an exceptionally graceful, grown-up sort of conversation.
I gathered that they were in Hiroshima on business of sort but in what field I couldn't really tell.
The man in particular held forth on a range of topics; Experimental Jazz, the underratedness of South African wine, American fiscal policy, Darwinian evolution, and its applicability to financial markets, the influence of Hinduism on the political and economic development of India. The woman interjected frequently with insightful observations of her own on every subject. Impressively the transition between each subject was completely natural and fluid. Listening to them was akin to watching a pair of figure skaters gliding across the ice. Like butterflies they never alit anywhere for long but fluttered gracefully onto the next topic once they had demonstrated their mastery of the previous one to each other.
I suppose there is such a thing as a technical excellence in conversation, much as there is in a golf swing or a swimming style. I also suspect that there was some unconsumated sexual attraction between the two. Familiarity between men and women seems to quickly degrade the technical quality of their conversation, as impression management gives way to affection. Had they been husband and wife I am sure their discussion would have been far less enjoyable for me to listen to.
As me and my girlfriend left the wine bar I began to wonder about the authenticity of their interests.
Did the man really love south african wine and French cinema? Maybe he prefers Budweiser and lesbian pornography. There is no way to know.
In a way asking about sincerity in this context is missing the point a little. The purpose of the such an exchange is to demonstrate a mastery of social cues, erudition and intelligence. The subjects at hand are merely the tools by which this is accomplished.
I couldn't help wonder though. I am not particularly nostalgic for my childhood. All things considered, being an adult has been the more enjoyable state for me.
Nevertheless a child's interest in subjects is rarely feigned. If a 6 year old tells me how he feels about his favorite Toys, we are having a genuine meeting of minds. He is sharing a part of his inner world.
Game playing is typically associated with children, but in the social realm adults seem to be far more avid game players than children.
On this occasion we found ourselves next to two middle aged Americans, in their mid to late forties.
A man and a woman, both were attractive, and dressed with the kind of slovenly elegance, popular among creative marketing types and the more dapper members of academia.
As my girlfriend was munching her excellent Tomato spaghetti I overheard much of their conversation. It was an exceptionally graceful, grown-up sort of conversation.
I gathered that they were in Hiroshima on business of sort but in what field I couldn't really tell.
The man in particular held forth on a range of topics; Experimental Jazz, the underratedness of South African wine, American fiscal policy, Darwinian evolution, and its applicability to financial markets, the influence of Hinduism on the political and economic development of India. The woman interjected frequently with insightful observations of her own on every subject. Impressively the transition between each subject was completely natural and fluid. Listening to them was akin to watching a pair of figure skaters gliding across the ice. Like butterflies they never alit anywhere for long but fluttered gracefully onto the next topic once they had demonstrated their mastery of the previous one to each other.
I suppose there is such a thing as a technical excellence in conversation, much as there is in a golf swing or a swimming style. I also suspect that there was some unconsumated sexual attraction between the two. Familiarity between men and women seems to quickly degrade the technical quality of their conversation, as impression management gives way to affection. Had they been husband and wife I am sure their discussion would have been far less enjoyable for me to listen to.
As me and my girlfriend left the wine bar I began to wonder about the authenticity of their interests.
Did the man really love south african wine and French cinema? Maybe he prefers Budweiser and lesbian pornography. There is no way to know.
In a way asking about sincerity in this context is missing the point a little. The purpose of the such an exchange is to demonstrate a mastery of social cues, erudition and intelligence. The subjects at hand are merely the tools by which this is accomplished.
I couldn't help wonder though. I am not particularly nostalgic for my childhood. All things considered, being an adult has been the more enjoyable state for me.
Nevertheless a child's interest in subjects is rarely feigned. If a 6 year old tells me how he feels about his favorite Toys, we are having a genuine meeting of minds. He is sharing a part of his inner world.
Game playing is typically associated with children, but in the social realm adults seem to be far more avid game players than children.
November 06, 2008
Questions I'd like to ask political candidates.
Well another election cycle is over, America has the most leftleaning President since Jimmy Carter in the White House, and the world is at the fever pitch of excitement that a protectionist has been handed the keys to the greatest economic engine the world has ever known.
As usual the media coverage was predictably horrendous and consisted almost entirely of rumination on Obamas skincolor and sporting event style strategic analysis.
In all the analysis I saw, discussion of the quality of Obama and Mccain's respective campaign strategies outweighed discussion of their suitability for office by a factor of at least 20-1.
Why?
It got me thinking... What questions would I ask a presidential (or prime ministerial one for that matter) candidate if I had the chance? I guess the qualities I'd like to see evidence of are an independence of thought, a capacity to think outside the tug of war parameters of established political discourse, and intellectual depth.
Here are my questions...
1) Name one issue on which you disagree with the majority of your fellow Republicans/Democrats.
2) Name one social problem you consider to be overrated in importance by the media.
3) Name one social problem you consider to be insufficiently discussed by the media.
4) Name three issues on which you have changed your mind since you entered politics.
5) Name three problems which you feel lie outside the scope of the office and which you therefore won't be solving during your term.
6) What do you think are the two most effective/positive pieces of policy or legislation brought in during the last fifty years?
7) What do you think have been the two most disastrous pieces of policy or legislation of the last fifty years?
8) Which current foreign leader is closest to yourself in political outlook?
9) What is your least popular opinion?
I would consider an inability to answer such questions in a thoughful and serious manner as evidence of that candidates unsuitability for office.
As usual the media coverage was predictably horrendous and consisted almost entirely of rumination on Obamas skincolor and sporting event style strategic analysis.
In all the analysis I saw, discussion of the quality of Obama and Mccain's respective campaign strategies outweighed discussion of their suitability for office by a factor of at least 20-1.
Why?
It got me thinking... What questions would I ask a presidential (or prime ministerial one for that matter) candidate if I had the chance? I guess the qualities I'd like to see evidence of are an independence of thought, a capacity to think outside the tug of war parameters of established political discourse, and intellectual depth.
Here are my questions...
1) Name one issue on which you disagree with the majority of your fellow Republicans/Democrats.
2) Name one social problem you consider to be overrated in importance by the media.
3) Name one social problem you consider to be insufficiently discussed by the media.
4) Name three issues on which you have changed your mind since you entered politics.
5) Name three problems which you feel lie outside the scope of the office and which you therefore won't be solving during your term.
6) What do you think are the two most effective/positive pieces of policy or legislation brought in during the last fifty years?
7) What do you think have been the two most disastrous pieces of policy or legislation of the last fifty years?
8) Which current foreign leader is closest to yourself in political outlook?
9) What is your least popular opinion?
I would consider an inability to answer such questions in a thoughful and serious manner as evidence of that candidates unsuitability for office.
October 24, 2008
The moral inefficiency of prostitution bans.
This article on the Guardian's 'comment is free' site made interesting reading. The article got me thinking about the constant argument between those who want prostitution banned outright and those who want it regulated. As a libertarian I personally don't have any interest in interfering with what other people choose to do with their bodies or what people choose to pay for, as long as no coercion is involved and no third party is harmed. I do find it amusing how many feminists think that a womans 'right to choose' is founded on self ownership but that principle somehow no longer applies when said ownership is used to offer sex for money rather than to abort foetuses.
I also think that the need for physical intimacy is universal, and found among the disabled as well as the able-bodied, the physically repulsive as well as the beautiful and the socially inept as well as the charming. There are many many people who live lives of intense physical and psychological loneliness and who are for whatever reason unable to form satisfactory relationships. To wish to deny such people whatever brief respite and fleeting comfort that they may find with a sex worker out of some misguided sense of moral righteousness seems pig-headed and obnoxious to me. Furthermore I think legalisation leaves the women in question far less vulnerable to exploitation than they would be otherwise.
Thats MY opinion. I appreciate however, that not everyone agrees. So for the purposes of this argument I am going to look at the other side. 'Lana,' the sex worker in the article is not a drug addicted abused teenager in the grip of a violent pimp. She is a university educated single mother, who has decided that prostitution is a preferable source of income to the available alternatives such as secretarial work, mainly because it provides independence, superior income and more time with her children. Her clients are by her account not abusive but generally polite middle aged businessmen. Nevertheless lets accept for the sake of argument that its EVIL. Quite what form that evil takes, I'm not sure. Perhaps the transaction leaves deep psychological damage in both client and prostitute that will take years to reveal itself. Perhaps she is corrupting the morals of her entire community and leading them onto the path to licentiousness and decadence. Perhaps if enough Lanas ply their sinful trade in central London Yahweh, Allah or Jehovah will come from the sky and do a Sodom and Gomorrah job on the whole city. Whatever. I don't care. We'll just take it as read that its EVIL.
But is it the most EVIL thing imaginable? It stands to reason that if Lanas entirely voluntary and noncoercive transactions with her clients are evil then what happens to women who are brought to this country to be exploited and live in near slave like conditions under brutal pimps is far far more evil.
Anyone who would try to ban prostitution would have to be pretty optimistic about the power of government to do stuff generally. A desire to stamp out the world's oldest profession is nothing if not ambitious!
By banning Lana from plying her sinful trade you either force her underground or make her give up and go back to her lower paying profession. Either way you forfeit tax revenue. Less tax means you can do less stuff. Stuff such as going after and prosecuting the sex traffickers who are commiting far worse acts.
Any way you look at it, from the point of view of reducing the total amount of evil going after Lana is inefficient
APPENDIX
Of course there are many ways you could spend the higher tax take produced by the legality of prostitution to reduce the total amount of EVIL. Alternately you could invest the money in GOOD (cancer research, third world aid, bibles in hotel rooms, organic vegetable subsidies... whatever floats your moral boat) and thus improve the GOOD/EVIL ratio. The point is that by declaring prostitution illegal you are essentially saying that it is SO evil that regardless of how highly it is taxed the GOOD thus generated can never outweigh the EVIL produced.
I also think that the need for physical intimacy is universal, and found among the disabled as well as the able-bodied, the physically repulsive as well as the beautiful and the socially inept as well as the charming. There are many many people who live lives of intense physical and psychological loneliness and who are for whatever reason unable to form satisfactory relationships. To wish to deny such people whatever brief respite and fleeting comfort that they may find with a sex worker out of some misguided sense of moral righteousness seems pig-headed and obnoxious to me. Furthermore I think legalisation leaves the women in question far less vulnerable to exploitation than they would be otherwise.
Thats MY opinion. I appreciate however, that not everyone agrees. So for the purposes of this argument I am going to look at the other side. 'Lana,' the sex worker in the article is not a drug addicted abused teenager in the grip of a violent pimp. She is a university educated single mother, who has decided that prostitution is a preferable source of income to the available alternatives such as secretarial work, mainly because it provides independence, superior income and more time with her children. Her clients are by her account not abusive but generally polite middle aged businessmen. Nevertheless lets accept for the sake of argument that its EVIL. Quite what form that evil takes, I'm not sure. Perhaps the transaction leaves deep psychological damage in both client and prostitute that will take years to reveal itself. Perhaps she is corrupting the morals of her entire community and leading them onto the path to licentiousness and decadence. Perhaps if enough Lanas ply their sinful trade in central London Yahweh, Allah or Jehovah will come from the sky and do a Sodom and Gomorrah job on the whole city. Whatever. I don't care. We'll just take it as read that its EVIL.
But is it the most EVIL thing imaginable? It stands to reason that if Lanas entirely voluntary and noncoercive transactions with her clients are evil then what happens to women who are brought to this country to be exploited and live in near slave like conditions under brutal pimps is far far more evil.
Anyone who would try to ban prostitution would have to be pretty optimistic about the power of government to do stuff generally. A desire to stamp out the world's oldest profession is nothing if not ambitious!
By banning Lana from plying her sinful trade you either force her underground or make her give up and go back to her lower paying profession. Either way you forfeit tax revenue. Less tax means you can do less stuff. Stuff such as going after and prosecuting the sex traffickers who are commiting far worse acts.
Any way you look at it, from the point of view of reducing the total amount of evil going after Lana is inefficient
APPENDIX
Of course there are many ways you could spend the higher tax take produced by the legality of prostitution to reduce the total amount of EVIL. Alternately you could invest the money in GOOD (cancer research, third world aid, bibles in hotel rooms, organic vegetable subsidies... whatever floats your moral boat) and thus improve the GOOD/EVIL ratio. The point is that by declaring prostitution illegal you are essentially saying that it is SO evil that regardless of how highly it is taxed the GOOD thus generated can never outweigh the EVIL produced.
The humbling of Alan Greenspan
Wall Street's erstwhile spiritual leader has shed his cloak of fiscal infallibity this week
Alan Greenspan has admitted that his thinking about quite fundamental aspects of financial markets was mistaken
According to the Washington Post
The former chairman of the Federal Reserve said that the crisis had shaken his very understanding of how markets work...
In the space of mere months, Greenspan has gone from world guru of high finance and darling of the political elite to being compared to Bill Buckner, the Red Sox first baseman whose infamous fielding error cost Boston the '86 World Series.
In reality is seems probable that Greenspan is neither God nor Goat but simply a victim (like the rest of us) of assuming that the regularity of his fiscal models would be matched by a corresponding regularity in the real world. We are all vulnerable to discounting the possibility of events of great impact and rarity in favor of the seductive regularity of averages. As pattern seeking creatures such biases seem pretty much hardwired into our cognitive architecture.
In fact it seems like the last few months of financial history are playing out as an utterly perfect illustration of the arguments advanced by Trader-Philosopher Naseem Taleb in his books Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan.
I'm not sure what I found more shocking, Alan Greenspan's utter humility in the face of a crisis
that seemingly calls core aspects of his belief system into question
Or his subsequent hubris.
"We have to recognize that this is almost surely a once-in-a-century phenomenon," Greenspan said,
Think about that. An 82 year-old man has just conceeded that the events of the past few weeks call into question fundamental assumptions, underpinning his entire professional life and body of work . Despite this, he is then willing to prognosticate with a fair degree of confidence, regarding the frequency of what we have just witnessed. Given that this is pretty much unanimously agreed to be unprecedented, we have exactly ONE data point. And from this we can work out the likely frequency of such events occuring in the future, how?
How do we know it is a once in a century deal? Perhaps this kind of thing happens on average once every twenty years or so and we have got insanely lucky over the last century. On the other hand perhaps it is staggeringly rare and only something we can expect to see once a millennium.
Is pretending to know the unknowable and proceeding to construct a brand new house of cards around that make believe knowledge on the ruins of the old, really the most advisable course of action? The question was not sarcastic I just don't know.
Such arrogance in the face of failure reminds me of a very similiar attitudes following the collapse of the ill-fated hedge fund Long Term Capital Management. (LTCM) Naseem Taleb covers the story in Fooled by Randomness
The market is very risky — far more risky than if you blithely assume that prices meander around a polite Gaussian average [i.e., the bell-shaped curve].
Anywhere the bell-curve assumption enters the financial calculations, an error can come out.
In 1993, [Scholes and Merton] joined some heavyweight Wall Street bond traders in the creation of a new hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management... The had at one point twenty-five PhD's on the payroll... In August 1998 the Russian government defaulted on its bonds, triggering a market meltdown. LTCM... was stuck without buyers... In the end, several banks reluctantly agreed to bail out the fund... only at the behest of the Federal Reserve Board, which was concerned about a wave of bankruptcies if LTCM went under.
[Merton and Scholes] made absolutely no allowance in the LTCM episode for the possibility of their not understanding markets and their methods being wrong. That was not a hypothesis to be considered... The fact that these "scientists" pronounced the catastrophic losses a "ten sigma" event reveals a Wittgenstein's ruler problem: Someone saying this is a ten-sigma either (a) knows what he is talking about with near perfection... or (b) just does not know what he is talking about... and it is an event that has a probability higher than once every several times the history of the universe. I will let the reader pick from these two mutually exclusive interpretations which one is more plausible.
Incidentally it also strikes me that Alan Greenspan is absolutely the wrong person to look to for advice about this particular crisis, not because I necessarily think he is wrong, or to blame for it, but because it seems to me that to asking a man in his eighties to objectively consider
whether or not, current events invalidate his entire lifes work is asking for the superhuman.
Maybe the most appropriate advice is found not in the pages of John Maynard Keynes or Milton Friedman but in William Shakespeare.
To paraphrase Hamlet, 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio than are dreamt of in your (economic) philosophy.'
Overconfidence that our understanding of things matches the real world seems to be at the root of a lot of tragedy.
So much of todays knowledge may prove to be founded on quicksand tommorow.
How much of todays corpus of economic and financial theory reflects an underlying reality in the external world and how much of it is mere mathematical masturbation? I don't know and I don't think the experts know either.
Alan Greenspan has admitted that his thinking about quite fundamental aspects of financial markets was mistaken
According to the Washington Post
The former chairman of the Federal Reserve said that the crisis had shaken his very understanding of how markets work...
In the space of mere months, Greenspan has gone from world guru of high finance and darling of the political elite to being compared to Bill Buckner, the Red Sox first baseman whose infamous fielding error cost Boston the '86 World Series.
In reality is seems probable that Greenspan is neither God nor Goat but simply a victim (like the rest of us) of assuming that the regularity of his fiscal models would be matched by a corresponding regularity in the real world. We are all vulnerable to discounting the possibility of events of great impact and rarity in favor of the seductive regularity of averages. As pattern seeking creatures such biases seem pretty much hardwired into our cognitive architecture.
In fact it seems like the last few months of financial history are playing out as an utterly perfect illustration of the arguments advanced by Trader-Philosopher Naseem Taleb in his books Fooled By Randomness and The Black Swan.
I'm not sure what I found more shocking, Alan Greenspan's utter humility in the face of a crisis
that seemingly calls core aspects of his belief system into question
"You found that your view of the world, your ideology was not right, it was not working?" said Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), the committee chairman.
"Absolutely, precisely," Greenspan said. "You know, that's precisely the reason I was shocked because I have been going for 40 years or more with very considerable evidence that it was working exceptionally well."
Or his subsequent hubris.
"We have to recognize that this is almost surely a once-in-a-century phenomenon," Greenspan said,
Think about that. An 82 year-old man has just conceeded that the events of the past few weeks call into question fundamental assumptions, underpinning his entire professional life and body of work . Despite this, he is then willing to prognosticate with a fair degree of confidence, regarding the frequency of what we have just witnessed. Given that this is pretty much unanimously agreed to be unprecedented, we have exactly ONE data point. And from this we can work out the likely frequency of such events occuring in the future, how?
How do we know it is a once in a century deal? Perhaps this kind of thing happens on average once every twenty years or so and we have got insanely lucky over the last century. On the other hand perhaps it is staggeringly rare and only something we can expect to see once a millennium.
Is pretending to know the unknowable and proceeding to construct a brand new house of cards around that make believe knowledge on the ruins of the old, really the most advisable course of action? The question was not sarcastic I just don't know.
Such arrogance in the face of failure reminds me of a very similiar attitudes following the collapse of the ill-fated hedge fund Long Term Capital Management. (LTCM) Naseem Taleb covers the story in Fooled by Randomness
The market is very risky — far more risky than if you blithely assume that prices meander around a polite Gaussian average [i.e., the bell-shaped curve].
Anywhere the bell-curve assumption enters the financial calculations, an error can come out.
In 1993, [Scholes and Merton] joined some heavyweight Wall Street bond traders in the creation of a new hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management... The had at one point twenty-five PhD's on the payroll... In August 1998 the Russian government defaulted on its bonds, triggering a market meltdown. LTCM... was stuck without buyers... In the end, several banks reluctantly agreed to bail out the fund... only at the behest of the Federal Reserve Board, which was concerned about a wave of bankruptcies if LTCM went under.
[Merton and Scholes] made absolutely no allowance in the LTCM episode for the possibility of their not understanding markets and their methods being wrong. That was not a hypothesis to be considered... The fact that these "scientists" pronounced the catastrophic losses a "ten sigma" event reveals a Wittgenstein's ruler problem: Someone saying this is a ten-sigma either (a) knows what he is talking about with near perfection... or (b) just does not know what he is talking about... and it is an event that has a probability higher than once every several times the history of the universe. I will let the reader pick from these two mutually exclusive interpretations which one is more plausible.
Incidentally it also strikes me that Alan Greenspan is absolutely the wrong person to look to for advice about this particular crisis, not because I necessarily think he is wrong, or to blame for it, but because it seems to me that to asking a man in his eighties to objectively consider
whether or not, current events invalidate his entire lifes work is asking for the superhuman.
Maybe the most appropriate advice is found not in the pages of John Maynard Keynes or Milton Friedman but in William Shakespeare.
To paraphrase Hamlet, 'There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio than are dreamt of in your (economic) philosophy.'
Overconfidence that our understanding of things matches the real world seems to be at the root of a lot of tragedy.
So much of todays knowledge may prove to be founded on quicksand tommorow.
How much of todays corpus of economic and financial theory reflects an underlying reality in the external world and how much of it is mere mathematical masturbation? I don't know and I don't think the experts know either.
February 24, 2008
The Changing Moral Zeitgeist
I would like to dedicate little essay to my father. He and I have had many heated debates.
Disagreement is the rule rather than the exception in our discussions, and we rarely convince each other of anything. Nevertheless they sometimes open up avenues of thought I hadn't previously considered and often help me to clarify my own thinking on topics. We once argued over whether the Ancient Greeks 'knew that slavery was wrong' That argument inspired this essay.
The Changing Moral Zeitgeist
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
The Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies
July 4, 1776
In the ideals that it professes the Declaration of Independence is one of the most inspiring documents ever written.
Thats why it saddens me that I have to disagree with a part of its message. Not with the rights to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. I think in this regard the Declaration of Independence is an expression of a profound moral truth.
What I have a problem with is the self-evident part. I really wish that it were true but History has convinced me that it just ain't so.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines 'self-evident' thus.
For most educated adults in the twenty-first century racism is perplexing because it is such an obvious evil. Society has reached an almost total consensus on the unacceptability of racial bigotry. This doesn't really feel like an accomplishment, racism seems such a blatant wrong as to not even worth debating. Put simply, to be racist is to be an idiot and/or a twisted hate-monger.
As a fairly young person in 2008 living in the west I find it hard to imagine how any intelligent, well-meaning person could be a racist. I lack the moral imagination to conceive of a world where racist attitudes are not only tolerated but the norm, even among intelligent cultured and well meaning people. In fact it is our present world that is historically remarkable for its lack of racism.
The English writer Leslie Poole Hartley famously said
"The Past is a foreign country. They do things differently there"
The past is not only foreign but more foreign than we most of us realize. They don't just do things differently there but they THINK differently there.
"And how will the New Republic treat the inferior races?… those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency? Well, the world is a world, and not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go… And the method that nature has followed hitherto in the shaping of the world, whereby weakness was prevented from propagating weakness… is death… The men of the New Republic … will have an ideal that will make the killing worth the while.”
Who do you think said the above, dear reader? Adolph Hitler? Heinrich Himmler? In fact it was H.G Wells. Today Wells is remembered chiefly for such Science Fiction novels, as War of The Worlds, The Invisible Man, and The Time Machine (and the movie versions that were made of them)
Wells was passionate about education, science, rationality and progress.
He believed in the desirability of a World State, a planned society that would advance science, end nationalism, and allow people to advance solely by merit rather than birth.
Wells was a co-founder in 1934 of what is now Diabetes UK the leading charity for people living with diabetes in Britain.
He meant well.
How did such a self-proclaimed champion of reason come to advocate a program of genocide more thorough and ambitious than even the Nazis ever hoped to undertake?
I don't know.
When confronted by a man like Wells my moral imagination fails me. His categories of thought of thought and frame of reference are too far away for me to be able to even begin to understand.
In his lifetime and after his death, Wells was considered a prominent socialist thinker.
Upon his death a commemorative plaque in his honor was installed at his home in Regent's Park.
What Wells's life illustrates is that the ideological horrors that gave birth to Auschwitz were not as far outside the worldwide intellectual mainstream of their time as we like to pretend with hindsight.
Abraham Lincoln is the most arguably the most revered president in American History, memorialized for ending Slavery and preserving the Union.
Here is what Lincoln had to say about race relations in 1858
"I will say, then, that I AM NOT NOR HAVE EVER BEEN in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the black and white races---that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with White people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the White and black races which will ever FORBID the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together, there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the White race."
— 4th Lincoln-Douglas debate, September 18th, 1858
I don't include this quote to disparage Lincoln or debunk his historical contributions and achievements. What I want to emphasize is that the above words were spoken by one of the most progressive men of his day, a man passionately committed to moral causes.
In many ways, the Doctor Dolittle stories by Hugh Lofting (written in the 1920s) are among my favorite children's stories. The authors warmth, love of children, and empathy for others shines off every page.
Right up until Polynesia, the doctors parrot starts calling Africans Coons, Niggers and Darkies.
How do intelligent, educated essentially good people come to hold reprehensible views?
In our collective imagination, the past is continually recast in the mold of the present, providing an illusion of continuity that masks just how different the the thoughts and attitudes of the past really were. Many of us get a large part of our idea of the past from movies.
Hollywood doesn't make movies about people from long ago. It makes movies about contemporary people in historical situations. Characters in movies set in the past - even those set only a couple of decades ago always have contemporary moral frames of reference. In movies made in 2008, "the good guys" can't be racist, even if the movie in question is set five hundred years in the past. I guess that this airbrushing of attitudes is necessary if we are to relate to the characters, but it does diminish our tremendous collective moral progress.
The fact is that nearly all of the bright, thoughtful, well-meaning people of the past held attitudes and opinions that would disgust us today.
Morally, just as much as technologically/culturally, we are standing on the shoulders of giants.
The roots of all Western culture can ultimately be traced back to the Ancient Greece, specifically to Fifth Century Athens. Greece is the wellspring of western Democracy, Literature , Art, Philosophy and Science. The Greeks also had slaves. Greek philosophy attracted the most brilliant men of the age, men who relentlessly questioned every aspect of their physical and social reality. They were no respecters of taboos and criticized the most fundamental aspects of their culture.
Despite earnest inquiry into every aspect of life the great Athenian philosophers never came to criticize slavery as a social institution.
I don't believe that this was out of a lack of moral courage. (Socrates took poison, rather than to betray his role of social critic) but out of a lack of moral imagination.
If we can't even understand the beliefs of men and women who lived a few decades ago how can we hope to understand the perspective of those who lived thousands of years in our past.
The things that seem effortlessly obviously true today, were arrived at through much struggle, suffering ,courage and WORK. What is now 'self-evident' is the result of decades and centuries of slow and painful progress up the moral ladder, with many setbacks along the way.
We are the beneficiaries of a tremendous moral inheritance as well as a technological and cultural one.
If we could speak to one of the slaves of ancient Greece or Rome today, what would he say? I am sure he didn't like BEING a slave, but I doubt as to whether even he would have been able to conceive of the evil of slavery as an institution.
In relatively more recent times we have the strange story of Anthony Johnson, a freed African-American slave turned farm owner. In 1654 he was responsible for the establishment of slavery in Virginia when a court ruled that John Casor, also a black man was, his personal property.
What we can learn from the moral failings of our ancestors?
I think that the most important lesson is a modesty in the face of our own beliefs. We are likely to have ethical blindspots as glaring as those who came before us and our descendants will be utterly bewildered as to why we could not see. I hope they don't judge us too harshly.
Disagreement is the rule rather than the exception in our discussions, and we rarely convince each other of anything. Nevertheless they sometimes open up avenues of thought I hadn't previously considered and often help me to clarify my own thinking on topics. We once argued over whether the Ancient Greeks 'knew that slavery was wrong' That argument inspired this essay.
The Changing Moral Zeitgeist
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
The Declaration of Independence of the Thirteen Colonies
July 4, 1776
In the ideals that it professes the Declaration of Independence is one of the most inspiring documents ever written.
Thats why it saddens me that I have to disagree with a part of its message. Not with the rights to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. I think in this regard the Declaration of Independence is an expression of a profound moral truth.
What I have a problem with is the self-evident part. I really wish that it were true but History has convinced me that it just ain't so.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines 'self-evident' thus.
self-evident
• adjective not needing to be demonstrated or explained; obvious
For most educated adults in the twenty-first century racism is perplexing because it is such an obvious evil. Society has reached an almost total consensus on the unacceptability of racial bigotry. This doesn't really feel like an accomplishment, racism seems such a blatant wrong as to not even worth debating. Put simply, to be racist is to be an idiot and/or a twisted hate-monger.
As a fairly young person in 2008 living in the west I find it hard to imagine how any intelligent, well-meaning person could be a racist. I lack the moral imagination to conceive of a world where racist attitudes are not only tolerated but the norm, even among intelligent cultured and well meaning people. In fact it is our present world that is historically remarkable for its lack of racism.
The English writer Leslie Poole Hartley famously said
"The Past is a foreign country. They do things differently there"
The past is not only foreign but more foreign than we most of us realize. They don't just do things differently there but they THINK differently there.
"And how will the New Republic treat the inferior races?… those swarms of black, and brown, and dirty-white, and yellow people, who do not come into the new needs of efficiency? Well, the world is a world, and not a charitable institution, and I take it they will have to go… And the method that nature has followed hitherto in the shaping of the world, whereby weakness was prevented from propagating weakness… is death… The men of the New Republic … will have an ideal that will make the killing worth the while.”
Who do you think said the above, dear reader? Adolph Hitler? Heinrich Himmler? In fact it was H.G Wells. Today Wells is remembered chiefly for such Science Fiction novels, as War of The Worlds, The Invisible Man, and The Time Machine (and the movie versions that were made of them)
Wells was passionate about education, science, rationality and progress.
He believed in the desirability of a World State, a planned society that would advance science, end nationalism, and allow people to advance solely by merit rather than birth.
Wells was a co-founder in 1934 of what is now Diabetes UK the leading charity for people living with diabetes in Britain.
He meant well.
How did such a self-proclaimed champion of reason come to advocate a program of genocide more thorough and ambitious than even the Nazis ever hoped to undertake?
I don't know.
When confronted by a man like Wells my moral imagination fails me. His categories of thought of thought and frame of reference are too far away for me to be able to even begin to understand.
In his lifetime and after his death, Wells was considered a prominent socialist thinker.
Upon his death a commemorative plaque in his honor was installed at his home in Regent's Park.
What Wells's life illustrates is that the ideological horrors that gave birth to Auschwitz were not as far outside the worldwide intellectual mainstream of their time as we like to pretend with hindsight.
Abraham Lincoln is the most arguably the most revered president in American History, memorialized for ending Slavery and preserving the Union.
Here is what Lincoln had to say about race relations in 1858
"I will say, then, that I AM NOT NOR HAVE EVER BEEN in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the black and white races---that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with White people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the White and black races which will ever FORBID the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together, there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the White race."
— 4th Lincoln-Douglas debate, September 18th, 1858
I don't include this quote to disparage Lincoln or debunk his historical contributions and achievements. What I want to emphasize is that the above words were spoken by one of the most progressive men of his day, a man passionately committed to moral causes.
In many ways, the Doctor Dolittle stories by Hugh Lofting (written in the 1920s) are among my favorite children's stories. The authors warmth, love of children, and empathy for others shines off every page.
Right up until Polynesia, the doctors parrot starts calling Africans Coons, Niggers and Darkies.
How do intelligent, educated essentially good people come to hold reprehensible views?
In our collective imagination, the past is continually recast in the mold of the present, providing an illusion of continuity that masks just how different the the thoughts and attitudes of the past really were. Many of us get a large part of our idea of the past from movies.
Hollywood doesn't make movies about people from long ago. It makes movies about contemporary people in historical situations. Characters in movies set in the past - even those set only a couple of decades ago always have contemporary moral frames of reference. In movies made in 2008, "the good guys" can't be racist, even if the movie in question is set five hundred years in the past. I guess that this airbrushing of attitudes is necessary if we are to relate to the characters, but it does diminish our tremendous collective moral progress.
The fact is that nearly all of the bright, thoughtful, well-meaning people of the past held attitudes and opinions that would disgust us today.
Morally, just as much as technologically/culturally, we are standing on the shoulders of giants.
The roots of all Western culture can ultimately be traced back to the Ancient Greece, specifically to Fifth Century Athens. Greece is the wellspring of western Democracy, Literature , Art, Philosophy and Science. The Greeks also had slaves. Greek philosophy attracted the most brilliant men of the age, men who relentlessly questioned every aspect of their physical and social reality. They were no respecters of taboos and criticized the most fundamental aspects of their culture.
Despite earnest inquiry into every aspect of life the great Athenian philosophers never came to criticize slavery as a social institution.
I don't believe that this was out of a lack of moral courage. (Socrates took poison, rather than to betray his role of social critic) but out of a lack of moral imagination.
If we can't even understand the beliefs of men and women who lived a few decades ago how can we hope to understand the perspective of those who lived thousands of years in our past.
The things that seem effortlessly obviously true today, were arrived at through much struggle, suffering ,courage and WORK. What is now 'self-evident' is the result of decades and centuries of slow and painful progress up the moral ladder, with many setbacks along the way.
We are the beneficiaries of a tremendous moral inheritance as well as a technological and cultural one.
If we could speak to one of the slaves of ancient Greece or Rome today, what would he say? I am sure he didn't like BEING a slave, but I doubt as to whether even he would have been able to conceive of the evil of slavery as an institution.
In relatively more recent times we have the strange story of Anthony Johnson, a freed African-American slave turned farm owner. In 1654 he was responsible for the establishment of slavery in Virginia when a court ruled that John Casor, also a black man was, his personal property.
What we can learn from the moral failings of our ancestors?
I think that the most important lesson is a modesty in the face of our own beliefs. We are likely to have ethical blindspots as glaring as those who came before us and our descendants will be utterly bewildered as to why we could not see. I hope they don't judge us too harshly.
February 23, 2008
Game Theory and Relationships (July 14 2005)
Game theory is a branch of mathematics popularised in recent years by 'A Beautiful Mind' the bestselling biography of mathematican John Nash and the movie of the same name starring Russell Crow.
Game Theory is a field that is difficult to summarise. I guess you could say it is a study of the interaction between multiple self interested rational agents.One of the most famous problems of of game theory is a situation known as the prisoners Dilemma.
Here is a Summary taken from the University of Stanford Website.
"Suppose that the police have arrested two people whom they know have committed an armed robbery together. Unfortunately, they lack enough admissible evidence to get a jury to convict. They do, however, have enough evidence to send each prisoner away for two years for theft of the getaway car.
The chief inspector now makes the following offer to each prisoner: If you will confess to the robbery, implicating your partner, and she does not also confess, then you'll go free and she'll get ten years. If you both confess, you'll each get 5 years. If neither of you confess, then you'll each get two years for the auto theft."
In any close relationship, whether that of parent to child, boyfriend to girlfriend or husband and wife, there exists the opportunity to exercise emotional leverage to gain some personal advantage. This is analogous to confessing in the above situation.
The penalties of having your trust betrayed are comparable to the person who must serve ten years in the above scenario. I think MOST longterm relationships tend to produce situations and powerdynamics similioar to the prisoners dilemma in which the guiding considerations of action becomes strategy rather than fairness.
A successful mutually beneficial relationship is ultimately based on both parties leaving the potential advantages on the table... (Neither "Confesses" in the above scenario)
I have GREAT respect for people who have the confidence and trust in me to apologise for something they have done. Apologising for past actions and admission of error more than anything else leaves you open to the exercise of emotional leverage by another party.I have been in situations in the past in friendships and relationships where I have felt myself to be in the wrong on a particular issue BUT also didnt have the trust or confidence in the other party to apologise for my actions.
I was not willing to give up leverage.If one person in a relationship wants to make strategic moves, the other person has three choices. A) Conceed the game B) Try to win the game C) Walk away from the game/relationship.Gameplaying in MANY walks of life interests and fascinates me.. In relationships it bores and fruistrates me and I wish I knew of a way out of such dilemmas
Game Theory is a field that is difficult to summarise. I guess you could say it is a study of the interaction between multiple self interested rational agents.One of the most famous problems of of game theory is a situation known as the prisoners Dilemma.
Here is a Summary taken from the University of Stanford Website.
"Suppose that the police have arrested two people whom they know have committed an armed robbery together. Unfortunately, they lack enough admissible evidence to get a jury to convict. They do, however, have enough evidence to send each prisoner away for two years for theft of the getaway car.
The chief inspector now makes the following offer to each prisoner: If you will confess to the robbery, implicating your partner, and she does not also confess, then you'll go free and she'll get ten years. If you both confess, you'll each get 5 years. If neither of you confess, then you'll each get two years for the auto theft."
In any close relationship, whether that of parent to child, boyfriend to girlfriend or husband and wife, there exists the opportunity to exercise emotional leverage to gain some personal advantage. This is analogous to confessing in the above situation.
The penalties of having your trust betrayed are comparable to the person who must serve ten years in the above scenario. I think MOST longterm relationships tend to produce situations and powerdynamics similioar to the prisoners dilemma in which the guiding considerations of action becomes strategy rather than fairness.
A successful mutually beneficial relationship is ultimately based on both parties leaving the potential advantages on the table... (Neither "Confesses" in the above scenario)
I have GREAT respect for people who have the confidence and trust in me to apologise for something they have done. Apologising for past actions and admission of error more than anything else leaves you open to the exercise of emotional leverage by another party.I have been in situations in the past in friendships and relationships where I have felt myself to be in the wrong on a particular issue BUT also didnt have the trust or confidence in the other party to apologise for my actions.
I was not willing to give up leverage.If one person in a relationship wants to make strategic moves, the other person has three choices. A) Conceed the game B) Try to win the game C) Walk away from the game/relationship.Gameplaying in MANY walks of life interests and fascinates me.. In relationships it bores and fruistrates me and I wish I knew of a way out of such dilemmas
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