Why speaking the truth is less dangerous than staying silent, according to Jordan Peterson

Peterson said in 2017:

Don't underestimate the power of truth. There's nothing more powerful. Now, in order to speak what you might regard as truth, you have to let go of the outcome. You have to think: all right, I'm going to say what I think — stupid as I am, biased as I am, ignorant as I am — I'm going to state what I think as clearly as I can. And I'm going to live with the consequences.…

Nothing brings a better world into being than the stated truth.

Now, you might have to pay a price for that, but … you're going to pay a price for every bloody thing you do — and everything you don't do. You don't get to choose to not pay a price. You get to choose which poison you're going to take — that's it. So if you're going to stand up for something, stand up for your truth.

It'll shape you, because people will respond and object, and tell you why you're a biased moron and why you're ignorant. And then if you listen to them, you'll be just that much less like that the next time you say something. And if you do that for 5 years, you'll be so damn tough and articulate and able to communicate and withstand pressure, that you won't even recognize yourself. And then you'll be a force to contend with.…

It is not safe to speak, but it is even less safe not to speak. … You'll just be a miserable worm at the end of about 20 years of that. No self respect, no power, no ability to voice your opinions, nothing left but resentment, because everyone's against you, because of course you've never stood up for yourself.…

Say what you think carefully. Pay attention to your words.… There'll be ups and downs, and there'll be pushback, and it'll be controversy, and all of that. It doesn't matter. Wake up! Tell the truth — or at least don't lie. That's a start.…

Don't be thinking you're alone. It's just that people … are afraid to talk or they don't know what to say.… The enemy is a cloud. They're a cloud of gnats. They're only courageous in groups. They're only courageous in mobs. If you stand your ground and don't apologize and articulate things properly, they'll disperse around you like they're not even there. So most of it's illusion.

Real people

When did we start using "real people" to mean "people who aren't famous"?

The phrase can be useful in a different sense: "I don't want to call this company's customer service department, because you can never get through to a real person." That's appropriate because you're contrasting real people with things that literally aren't people but mere imitations -- computers, robots.

But when a political talk show host says something like, "And now, we're going to take a break from talking to our guests, and hear what some real people have to say about this issue," I have to feel sorry for those guests. They might be high-level politicians or pundits, but they're human beings too. Everyone's a real person.

What's the most energy-efficient state in the US?

Apparently the answer is my state, New York.

You can see the info for all states in this interactive map.

(Via the Freakonomics blog. If you're interested in the full report by the Rocky Mountain Institute, here's the PDF.)

Could this be some of the fruits of "elevator environmentalism" in NYC?

Maybe that's part of it, but there seems to be a problem with how the report measures energy efficiency. They did it "by dividing each state’s G.D.P. by the kilowatt hours of electricity it consumed." As a commenter on the Freakonomics blog says:

This study assumes all kinds of weird relationships between energy and GDP that just don’t seem to be accurate. You know why New York is so high on that list? Because banking takes a lot less energy than farming does to produce money. You know why Mississippi and Kentucky are at the bottom? Because farming and coal mining are energy intensive and produce inexpensive products.

So what’s the answer then? Stop farming and make every state convert to a white collar economy? Doesn’t seem feasible to me.

Tellingly, the blog post does ask readers for feedback, but only feedback on "how to close the gap" among the different states, not suggestions for more useful ways to frame the problem or measure the gap.

In fairness, the authors of the study show up in the comments section to defend their conclusions. Do you think their defense is very convincing? They claim to control for a lot of variables. But even taking them at their word, there seems to be a deeper problem, which is that a lot of the energy-intensive activity (farming, etc.) that's done by the lower-ranked states makes it possible for, say, New Yorkers to enjoy the array of modern conveniences that make it so comfortable to live the lifestyle of, say, a reasonably affluent office worker in the Northeast. (I don't want to overstate this as if it were some kind of clear-cut dichotomy: the report ranks California, which produces enormous amounts of food among other goods, as one of the most energy-efficient states.)

In other words, the suggestion that the supposedly less efficient states should simply conform to the more efficient ones may be a nice thought -- but it's easy to wish for the world we're living in to be better. We're able to look at it first-hand, up close, and vividly see its many flaws. It's a lot harder to see how all the interconnected parts of the hulking, complicated machinery of society might be thrown out of whack if we made the proposed sweeping reforms -- even on the overly optimistic assumption that they'd be implemented brilliantly and in good faith. (By the way, for those readers who might think of me as a liberal, I'm try to invoke a conservative principle here.)

And of course,

New York being #1 in GDP/kWh just shows what you can do by fabricating earnings on Wall Street. They will not be #1 on that list for long.

Another commenter has a similar point but, I think, takes it too far:

Look at the list of the most efficient by kWh. 7 of the 10 have little in the way of "real" wealth creation industries - by which I mean either farming/extraction or manufacturing. If you want to create real wealth that doesn’t involve repackaging money or ideas a dozen times, then I think a different metric is required.

I don't know how you can distinguish "real" wealth from non-"real" wealth. Why are farming and manufacturing the only things that are "real"?

Why isn't work that gets done in New York "real"?

This calls for some My Dinner with Andre, specifically Wally's rant:

I mean, is Mount Everest more "real" than New York? I mean, isn't New York "real"? I mean, you see, I think if you could become fully aware of what existed in the cigar store next door to this restaurant, I think it would just blow your brains out! I mean...I mean, isn't there just as much "reality" to be perceived in the cigar store as there is on Mount Everest? I mean, what do you think? You see, I think that not only is there nothing more real about Mount Everest, I think there's nothing that different, in a certain way. I mean, because reality is uniform, in a way....

Not a real plumber,* not a real war correspondent, and not really named Joe

So who is Joe the Plumber, really?

He's "that guy" -- "you know that guy" who ... well, just watch the clip:



"We all know that guy."


* Actually, he may be a plumber, but he's unlicensed, and I wanted to use "real(ly)" three times in the heading. But is it such a big deal for a plumber not to be licensed? Uh, yeah.

The reality of time and a doodle of me

My mom blogs our post-Thanksgiving trip to a Madison cafe:

Others may read about metaphysics. Me, I'm making a puppet out of the sugar packet drawing on the recycled-paper-brown napkins...

If you look at a closeup of the photo in that blog post, you can see a doodle she drew of me:

She adds:

The question arose: Is time not an illusion?

That was spinning off an essay I was reading called "Some Free Thinking About Time"* by the philosopher Arthur Norman Prior. He makes this pithy argument:

All attempts to deny the reality of time founder, so far as I can see, on the problem of explaining the appearance of time's passage: for appearing is itself something that occurs in time. Eddington once said that events don't happen, we merely come across them; but what is coming across an event but a happening?

That's why he "believe[s] in the reality of the distinction between past, present, and future" -- "that what we see as a progress of events is a progress of events, a coming to pass of one thing after another, and not just a timeless tapestry with everything stuck there for good and all."

That seems so trivially true -- why would anyone deny it? Well, certain scientific types will say that the theory of relativity shows that our common-sense view of time is simply mistaken. Prior has an elaborate response to this -- I can't get into the details of his argument here, but I'll just say I love how he concludes by cutting the Gordian knot:

We may say that the theory of relativity isn't about real space and time, in which the earlier-later relation is defined in terms of pastness, presentness, and futurity; the "time" which enters into the so-called space-time of relativity theory isn't this, but is just part of an artificial framework which scientists have constructed to link together observed facts in the simplest way possible, and from which those things which are systematically concealed from us are quite reasonably left out.

By the way, isn't Prior a perfect name for someone who thinks about these questions for a living? Reminds me of the scene in The Office where Michael reveals that Dwight was lying about having to leave work for a dentist appointment:

Michael: What’s his name?

Dwight: [long pause] Crentist.

Michael: Your dentist’s name is Crentist ... huh. Sounds a lot like dentist.

Dwight: Maybe that’s why he became a dentist?

* The essay is in the anthology Metaphysics: The Big Questions -- you can see it in the photo.

Sarah Palin and the Thanksgiving turkey slaughter

My mom has a perfectly apt post about Palin giving an interview with slaughtering going on in the background. Here's the post in its entirety:

HuffPo is aghast that turkey-killing doesn't faze Sarah Palin.

Deal with it, you candy-asses. If you eat meat, something like that is going on in the background for you too.

I followed her link to HuffingtonPost and noticed that the post has an amazing 4,000+ comments. And based on skimming through some of them, it looks like HuffPo's commenters are more intelligent than HuffPo's writers.

One good point from the comments section:

Newsflash: Farmers kill animals. Then they sell them. Grocery stores package them. Meat-eaters buy them and eat them. Apparently people in the Ivory Tower think meat just appears, much like manna from Heaven. This is odd, considering their general distaste for all things religious--especially Christian.

And here's one more (slightly edited):

You people don't understand Alaska.

If you've ever been there, it really is America's last frontier populated with rugged people.

Actually seeing the reality of the facts of life and death (whether human or animal) is NOT uncommon there as it is in the lower 48. I think this is mostly a good thing. Here in Brooklyn, there's lots of people who eat chicken every day, but have never seen a live chicken running around the yard. You just go buy it at the supermarket. Not good.

Sarah grew up in Alaska and is used to these things. I'll give her that. Alaskans probably laugh at the lower 48's squeamishness.

Blog headings are pointless

3 instances of writers writing against their own genre:

1. There's a long tradition -- going back at least to 1936 -- of law review articles attacking law review articles. Judge Richard Posner's from a few years ago, for instance. My mom also wrote one much earlier -- it's excerpted in the block quote in this post.

2. This blog post attacking blog posts stirred up the blogosphere a few weeks ago.

3. Now there's an essay called "Why Essays Are So Damned Boring," by Cristina Nehring.

This essay helped me stop feeling guilty about not reading more "essay" essays -- the kinds of things that appear in the New Yorker, Harper's, and those annual Best American Essays books, as opposed to reporting or opinion pieces of the sort that are more common in my periodicals of choice, like the Washington Post and The New Republic.

I generally prefer straightforward analysis if I'm going to read about the world. If I'm not going to get tons of concrete information or rigorous arguments about how things work, then I'd rather just forget about the serious stuff altogether and listen to music or watch a movie. (And not a protest song or an ideological movie!) I'm less interested in some squishy grey area between the analytical/political and the creative/autobiographical.

Back to the essay... Nehring has some inspiring words:

We have grown terribly—if somewhat hypocritically—weary of larger truths. The smarter and more intellectual we count ourselves, the more adamantly we insist that there is no such thing as truth, no such thing as general human experience, that everything is plural and relative and therefore undiscussable.

Of course, everything is plural, everything is arguable, and there are limits to what we can know about other persons, other cultures, other genders. But there is also a limit to such humility; there is a point at which it becomes narcissism of a most myopic sort, a simple excuse to talk only about one’s own case, only about one’s own small area of specialization. Montaigne thought it the essayist’s duty to cross boundaries, to write not as a specialist (even in himself) but as a generalist, to speak out of turn, to assume, to presume, to provoke.

“Where I have least knowledge,” said the blithe Montaigne, “there do I use my judgment most readily.” ...

“The next best thing to a good sermon is a bad sermon,” said Montaigne’s follower and admirer Ralph Waldo Emerson, the first American essayist. In a good sermon we hear our own discarded thoughts brought “back to us by the trumpets of the last judgment,” in the words of Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance.” In a bad sermon we formulate those thoughts ourselves—through the practice of creative disagreement. If an author tells us “love is nothing but jealousy” and we disagree, it is far more likely that we will come up with our own theory of love than if we hear a simple autobiographical account of the author’s life. It is hard to argue with someone’s childhood memory—and probably inadvisable. It is with ideas that we can argue, with ideas that we can engage. ...

Today’s essayists need to be emboldened, and to embolden one another, to move away from timid autobiographical anecdote and to embrace—as their predecessors did—big theories, useful verities, daring pronouncements. We need to destigmatize generalization, aphorism, and what used to be called wisdom. We must rehabilitate the notion of truth—however provisional it might be.

Of course, this argument is setting up a delicious paradox: if you vehemently disagree with her thesis, you've proved it!

The last sentence in that block quote is a "good sermon" to me, since it echoes this post.

And the Montaigne quote ("Where I have least knowledge...") could serve as a powerful rebuke to the anti-blog blog post linked above. More about that later...


UPDATE: This post is making my mom nervous!

More reality

WARNING: Completely abstract blog post.

So, last week I wrote this blog post about confronting reality.

As it happened, the photographer of the tomato photo that I used in the post, Don LaVange, showed up in the comments and offered this critique:

The difficulty I have with your stated goal "The way I look at things, one of your very most important goals should always be to accurately perceive reality." is how futile, and therefore wrongheaded, such pursuit is. I see reality as infinitely deep, perceptions always varying depending on the context of the looking.

Maybe it's true that I attempt to perceive "reality", but if I try to frame that reality linguistically I think I'm always going to come up short, and so will we all.

When I wrote the post, I was thinking: "People are either not going to like this because they disagree with it, or they're not going to like it because they think it's too forehead-slappingly obvious to be worth pointing out." As between those two possibilities, I'm happy if the response was the former.

As I understand the last point in that comment, it's basically: how can we succeed in perceiving / confronting / dealing with reality ... if we can't even do such a simple thing as defining it in words?

Well, first of all, I've said before that I don't see language as an inevitable precondition of thought:

Yes, language can be essential to thought, but language can also box in thought. (I'm inclined to agree with the thought-precedes-language side of the debate outlined at that link.)

Just because we might lack the words to describe something doesn't mean we're not able to think about it. Does it?

I would go even further: just because we can't think about something doesn't mean it's not important!

Now, obviously, if there's something we can't think about at all, then there's nothing we can do about it. End of discussion (literally!).

But let's say there's something that we can go a good way forward in thinking about, but unfortunately always hit a brick wall at some point. If that's the case, then it really seems like we should say: hey, that's better than nothing! As Voltaire said, "The best is the enemy of the good." The fact that we're probably not going to settle on a comprehensive, uncontroversial answer to something like, say, "What is the good life?" is not a reason to avoid doing the best we can to approach a correct answer. After all, that question is complex and multifarious enough that even a highly incomplete answer would still be ... you know, pretty good!

It doesn't need to be that lofty, of course. It could be any specific decision you make in your life -- what house to buy, or what drink to order at a cafe. If you haven't looked closely at the house to check for defects, that's not perceiving reality. If you believe that "dark" coffee is more heavily caffeinated than "light" coffee, when actually light coffee has an infinitesimally greater amount of caffeine, that's not perceiving reality.

My point being: just because we're talking about a weighty-sounding philosophical concept, "reality," doesn't mean the solution needs to be a philosophical one. You have all these discrete perceptions, decisions, and experiences, and maybe from all those trillions of little things, there emerges some abstraction we can call "reality" (and others we can call "fantasy," "deception," etc.). But if that's the way it happens, does that mean that it's vital to grasp that emerging abstraction? Couldn't it be just as worthwhile to grasp enough of the discrete little things?

In short, I think it might valid to say that "reality" is the basic standard against which our beliefs and actions should be judged, even if we'd be hard-pressed to articulate a satisfying definition of the word.

Let's get back to LaVange's point that reality is "infinitely deep, perceptions always varying depending on the context of the looking." Of course, "perceptions" are not the same thing as "reality." He's not saying otherwise, though -- he's not saying there is no objective reality. He's just saying we'll never know what it is.

Now, maybe I would agree with that. But does that mean I also need to agree with the conclusion that it's not worthwhile to pursue knowledge of reality because doing so is bound to be futile?

No, because again, "the best is the enemy of the good." "The best" is: total knowledge of the real world. I'm happy to admit we'll probably never attain that.

But to throw up our hands at that point? That would be shunning "the good" -- namely ... getting reality as much as we can, and doing as much as we can to fix the problems with it.

Will it be an unmitigated success? No. Will we understand everything? No. Will it be totally satisfying? No.

So what's the point? Well, I don't think I can answer that without being blatantly circular: the point is it's what's real. There are some things you're just stuck with. We're stuck with reality. There's no way out.

Whether you believe it was created by God or blind physical forces or anything else doesn't really seem to matter. We'll never agree on those things -- that debate may very well be pointless. But we should be able to agree that the real world is what's here, now, right in front of us, and that that's really important.

That itself doesn't really get you anywhere and might not be any fantastic insight. So why am I talking about it? Because it's the starting point for whatever comes next -- in your thoughts, or your life. And if it's not the starting point ... well, then I think that's a serious problem.


RELATED BLOG POSTS:

1. How I've made peace with skeptical epistemology. (That discussion starts a few paragraphs into the post.)

2. Fortuitously, Church of Rationality just had a post yesterday on "the essence of life." See that post for an extremely condensed, 2-point distillation of life. Point 1 in particular is closely related to this post.

3. Althouse: "Time to participate in reality. It's beautiful too."

--

For the record, this is my 50th blog post. Now I just have to do that many posts, again, and I can have some kind of gala celebration.

Get reality

WARNING: Question-begging blog post ahead.

Lis, with whom about 50 other Americans and I lived together in London, which felt at times like an alternate reality, says:

In writing, or in any art, reality inspires. Yet, as a reader and a writer, I strive to avoid reality through my readings and pieces of writing. I embrace the absurd while staying away from anything that may tether me to reality. This fear of reality is recognized by many who write. Nabokov skillfully convinces readers that his reality is placidly absurd; Humbert Humbert is sane and a sympathetic protagonist. Gabe Hudson writes of a war hero surviving six holes in the head while his daughter’s soul harbors herself in him. Kafka’s apes speak and humans turn into responsible bugs in his stories. Likewise, poetry reeks of the absurd. The idea of comparing two dissimilar things to illustrate a relationship is absurd.

Yet, when faced with how to define the absurd — I simply trip over “unique and original”. But after minutes of contemplating this on the treadmill, I come to T.S. Eliot’s “Mankind cannot bear much reality.” I want the absurd to be something we do not encounter everyday or something in which we fear an encounter. I want the miraculously illogic of the world to prevail in pieces of writing. I want the wildly unreasonable to work itself into the lines and the characters of each piece I read. I, myself, cannot bear much reality, but ironically, reality is what inspires the absurdity in writings.

This is the exact opposite of how I see the world!

That's probably why I have such a negligible understanding of poetry. [UPDATE: More thoughts on not appreciating poetry, etc.]

The way I look at things, one of your very most important goals should always be to accurately perceive reality. That sounds so obvious and boring that it's tempting to think it can't be a particularly worthy goal, that surely it would be more worthwhile and exciting to transform, dress up, or escape reality somehow.

But I actually think that simply confronting the real world as it stands is a complicated, important, and challenging enough endeavor that nothing additional is needed to justify devoting your life to it. And the idea that the unadorned real world isn't exciting enough ... well, that would be a pretty depressing outlook on life if you really stuck to it.

If I had to attribute a single "theme" to this blog, I'd say it's this:

We need to look at reality, and see it for what it transparently is.

Being uninterested in looking reality in the face will cause you to worry about things that aren't really problems, and ignore the real problems.

But what about art? That always involves transcending reality. You're not saying you're anti-art, are you? Well, no, of course I'm not against all art, but it all depends: art can bring you closer or take you further away. If a war movie accurately shows the brutality of war to viewers who've never seen war in person, that's bringing people closer to reality --> good. When the movie Fahrenheit 9/11 depicted pre-2003 Iraq as a place full of happy children galavanting around in playgrounds until the US came in and messed everything up, that was taking people further from reality --> bad.

Non-literal art such as instrumental music might be a more awkward fit in that framework. But I do think it fits in there somewhere ... if you believe, as I do, that music's function is to channel emotions. And those, of course, are perfectly real. (Oh, and, yeah, can of worms. I could certainly get a whole week's worth of blogging out of the music/emotions point, but that will have to wait.)

Maybe in the distant future, we'll have enough of the world understood and under control that we won't need to devote so much energy to figuring out what's true and what's false, what's real and what's not. But so far, humanity's track record at staying firmly tethered to reality has not exactly been an unadulterated success.

(Photo by Don LaVange.)

Reality for Hillary Clinton supporters

Well, I think I've devoted enough words to explaining why media sexism was not responsible for Hillary Clinton's loss in 2008. (1, 2, 3.) Now I just want to say something about the bigger picture. And this would apply even if you disagree with the previous posts -- that is, even if you're still convinced that media sexism played a role in her defeat.

Any presidential candidate is going to have to deal with the reality that the way the candidates are treated is always arbitrary and unfair. To the extent that Hillary Clinton's supporters are threatening to vote for John McCain despite all common sense (they should obviously prefer Obama on the merits), they're suggesting that they're simply unable to deal with reality.

I believe a woman can become president -- let's not shortchange her accomplishment in proving that a woman could be taken seriously as a Commander-in-Chief -- and I hope it happens sooner rather than later. But Hillary Clinton doesn't represent all women, and you're not doing women any favors if you suggest otherwise. She's one specific women, with all her many strengths and weaknesses. If it was wrong for Chris Matthews to doubt that she won her Senate seat "on her [own] merit," then it's just as wrong to doubt that she lost the nomination on her own merit too.

Her own staffers have offered up a litany of plausible-sounding explanations for why she lost. None of them have to do with media bias; they're about her own poor strategic decisions. Sample: "There was not any plan in place from beginning to end on how to win the nomination." Slight oversight. One staffer had this surprising assessment: "I just don't think she was hungry enough for it in the beginning." And of course, "the campaign inexplicably wrote off many states entirely."

And she lost because Obama ran such a brilliant campaign.

Oh, and remember the invasion of Iraq? That was kind of important.

I'm not saying she shouldn't run again in the future -- maybe she could rework her strategy and message, and win. That'd be OK with me. But if you're a Democrat who's interested in moving the country away from the disastrous Bush administration and into the future with a Democratic White House and Congress, you need to face reality. The reality is that politics is tough and unfair. You don't win by running a failed campaign and then spinning out alternate scenarios that would have been more fair and would have made your candidate win. You win by winning in the real world as it actually is right now . . . with all its flaws and prejudices and unfairness and silliness and arbitrariness.

If you disagree with this, you disagree with Hillary Clinton. After all, for most of her campaign, her number-one theme was that you should pick the person who'll be an effective "agent" -- the one who can actually get things done in the real world.

I mean, how was she planning on behaving as president? If she supported some piece of legislation that Congress failed to pass, was she planning on raising the (legitimate) complaint that the structure of the Senate is unfair to larger states, and then claiming a moral victory? That's what you would have to expect based on how she and her surrogates conducted themselves during the primaries.

And by the way, if you believe that the sexism in the primaries was unbearable -- literally, in the sense that it was so intense that she lost because of it -- then it's hard to see how you could agree with her that she would have been the most electable candidate. I mean, wouldn't you expect there to be more sexism against her in the general election than in the primaries?

But, of course, that's all irrelevant now. Or at least, it should be. If you want the kinds of policies that were advocated in the Democratic primaries (which Hillary admitted were largely identical from candidate to candidate) to be implemented sooner rather than later, the person who's going to do it is not going to be the loser Hillary Clinton, or the Republican John McCain, or the irrelevant Ralph Nader. If anyone's going to do it, it's going to be the winner, Barack Obama.

Imagine relatively few possessions

The New York Times recently published a human-interest story about an Austin family — Aimee and Jeff Harris and their two kids — who are professing to get rid of most of their possessions.


I'm not sure how a family in Texas gets a long article in a New York newspaper devoted to their lifestyle change. But whatever. Let's see what exactly they're doing.

They say on their blog:

We have no need of a 12 piece, breakable set of dishes and will replace them with enamel coated metal dishes, cups, bowls for traveling and camping with. I have no need of high heeled shoes and purses and will replace them with some sturdy Goodwill boots and a back pack. Things of that nature.

I certainly can't fault them for giving away so much to charity. But for a family who's pitching themselves as abandoning possessions, they sure sound like they have a lot of shopping to do.

They're also going to give away their current cars ... and get new cars (again, not exactly monastic behavior) ... and drive all the way from their current home in Texas to Vermont (where they've never been) to start a new life. I'm not sure how driving across the country — which is to say, using up the world's resources and unnecessarily contributing to carbon emissions, just to give a partial list of the evils of driving — is part of simplifying your life and returning to nature. Americans are so obsessed with our car culture that using a car doesn't even register as something that goes against the ideals of simplicity, counterculture, anti-consumerism. Thus, the Times write-up never mentions their car situation, and I doubt that the writers had a second thought about this. Or if they did, it was quickly dismissed: "Come on, you have to have a car!"

I'm not sure exactly what their financial situation is, but it's probably pretty cushy in the first place for them to even consider doing this. Aimee says that part of what's making their project feasible is that Jeff will be able to keep his full-time job because he can do it from anywhere with high-speed internet access. How much are they really vouching for the idea of leading an ascetic life if it's powered by technology in a way that would have been unthinkable just a couple decades ago? You know, it took a lot of people, using a lot of money and possessions, to get to this point.

The family also reminds me of Jason, who's described in the book Your Money or Your Life (blogged previously). He had a countercultural, anti-money life philosophy.* He deliberately avoided getting a "real job." The result was that the lack of income caught up with him, forcing him to flail away looking for any odd jobs he could come up with since he was so desperate to have enough money to get by. His radical ethos caused him to be all the more tied down by material things:

Jason's "money isn't important" attitude was just as limiting as [his girlfriend] Nedra's search for happiness in tangible possessions. Because he refused to participate in the standard cultural job-and-money game, his choices in life were severely limited. He found that he spent more time in making do and making trades than he would have in working at a steady job.

I of course wish the Harrises the best — particularly the 1- and 5-year-old children, who, like all children, aren't consenting to be confined by their parents' values. But who's to say that the ultra-austere focus on minimizing possessions won't just lead this family to become all the more fixated on possessions? After all, you need some things to survive, and this project seems to emphasize and even glorify those relatively few (but surely still numerous) possessions.

If that ends up happening with this family, or if they just plain don't go through with it, I'm guessing that won't get written up in the New York Times.

* In case you have the book, the character appears throughout Chapter 2.

Layers of tragedy in Burma

I jotted down some notes to myself about what I could blog about the aftermath of the cyclone in Burma while I was sitting in NYC's most august jazz club, the Village Vanguard. Charlie Haden, Ethan Iverson, and Paul Motian were playing their rarefied, cerebral brand of jazz. Oh, this is a perfect illustration of Peter Singer's famous ethical argument, I thought. I could have had an enjoyable evening some other way that didn't cost as much, and donated the savings to some charity that would step in to the rescue.

But no, that's not quite how the world works. Peter Singer says that it's immoral to dine at an expensive restaurant since you could instead stay home and give the money you'd save to a charity that would save people's lives. (According to Singer, you could save a life for every month you avoided eating out.) Now, there are a bunch of problems with this argument, and I hope to talk about them in a later post. But for now, the relevant problem is that it's really hard to try to go out in the world and find lives to save on the cheap.

It's tempting to think that we have the resources to end world suffering, if only we had the willpower. But the American public doesn't seem too upset about its tax dollars being used foreign aid even though Americans believe, on average, that we spend more than 100 times as much of our GDP on foreign aid as we actually do. There's some occasional grumbling about foreign aid, of course, but this misperception hasn't sparked an outcry. In fact, most Americans either have no opinion or would prefer that we spend more on foreign aid than we do. So the willingness is there; the bigger stumbling block is how effective our assistance would be.

Even if you can somehow make sure the money gets earmarked for purely beneficent purposes, the aid you send might only strengthen an autocracy. Money is fungible, so a government that receives $X to spend on food for its people suddenly has $X more of its old money that it doesn't need to spend on food but can instead use for _________. And even this is idealistic, since it's hard to make sure that a corrupt government is going to scrupulously honor the earmarks.

Burma seems to be a case in point. The US and the UN are desperately trying to help, but the Burmese government is playing hard to get. In the past, Burma has not been embarrassed to throw out aid workers. Now that the situation is so dire that dead bodies are literally piling up all over the place, however, the government is going a step further. This time, they've barred UN aid workers from even entering their country in the first place. They'll accept only outside resources; they won't accept foreign workers physically in their country to coordinate the aid. Why? Because help from outsiders would be "a potential threat to their two-decade hold on power." (They've started to accept aid from the US, but with the same restriction.)

And to top it all off, the government isn't even putting the cyclone response as its current top priority. They're too busy drafting a road map to a fake democracy.

All of this behavior implies that they specifically want to exploit the inherent shortcomings of foreign aid for their own benefit. Meanwhile, there's no telling how many new deaths are being caused each day as a result of this obstinacy: as many as 100,000 people died as a direct result of the cyclone (even the Burmese government's early estimate of the death toll, excluding "missing" people, was over 20,000). And one-and-a-half million people have been left homeless. (I wouldn't be surprised if these numbers have proven to be significant understatements by the time you read this.) The potential for outbreaks of disease in this unsanitary environment is overwhelming. Assuming that things are going to continue on this path, Burma is committing a passive genocide against its own people.

[UPDATE, May 31: U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has now confirmed this in an "emotional" speech: Burma's obstruction of foreign assistance has cost "tens of thousands of lives." Also, "U.S., British and French Navy ships off the coast of Myanmar are poised to leave because the government has blocked them from delivering assistance."]

If you ever doubt that evil is a real, objective phenomenon in the world, just remember the Burmese government's response to the cyclone in 2008.

Back to Peter Singer's ethical theory. If he's right that your restaurant expenditures should be judged based on the missed opportunity to donate to charity, then foreign aid should be judged all the more harshly if it fails to help people. We need to face the reality that sometimes there might just not be much we can do to alleviate the suffering, and the money would be better spent elsewhere. At this point, it's hard to see how we could possibly rescue the Burmese except through military force, but the failure of the United States and its international coalition in the Iraq war renders another nation-building adventure unlikely in the near future. To the extent that there are longer-term foreign policies or global trends that tend to promote liberal democracy and erode dictatorships, those might be more fruitful than a policy of "Oh, a headline-worthy disaster just happened, so we need to fix it."