"Sex is the new God."

So says Danielle Pouliot (who, full disclosure, is my girlfriend) on her new blog, Little Miss Anthropy.

She explains:

Sex is worshipped; life revolves around It; we obsess over ways to please It (or, at least, someone who may give It to us); and we abandon the benefactor when things don't go our way.

As to that last point, there might also be a parallel going the other way: people may perversely cling to the "benefactor" when it/he/she abuses them.

Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart argue in their book Sacred and Secular that religiosity is inversely correlated with "existential security." That is, the more secure you are in your basic existence, the more likely it is that your existence is a secular one. (They concede that the United States is a glaring exception to this general rule, but they say it's just that -- an exception.)

They describe people with low existential security as

more vulnerable populations, especially in poorer countries, [that] chronically face life-threatening risks linked with malnutrition and lack of access to clean water; they are relatively defenseless against HIV/AIDS, malaria and other diseases, and against natural disasters; they lack effective public healthcare and education; and their life expectancies are low and their child mortality rates are high. Despite the spread of electoral democracy during the last decade, these problems tend to be compounded by lack of good governance, disregard for human rights, gender inequality and ethnic conflict, political instability, and ultimately state failure. (217-218)

Their empirical data from around the world show that these countries tend to be the most religious.

First ladies and gender insanity

Penelope Trunk has some choice words on the awkward gender dynamics of the present day:

What is up with the constant photo ops of the wives of the men running the financial universe? What about the two women in the G-20? Do we put their husbands in the midst of this group of women? No. It would look insane. And that is exactly the reason that all the other women in the group should feel insane. ...

The G-20 Wives’ Club photos are particularly insulting because these women are being associated not by their special interests, or particular education, or common background, but merely by who they are sleeping with. Seriously. When, other than when rounding up prostitutes for jail, has this approach to grouping women been acceptable to society? ...

While I write this post, Adam Toren has the unfortunate timing of sending me an email to tell me I have been named one of the top 100 women bloggers. I email him back immediately to ask him if he has a similar award for the top 100 men.

And here's my point: women do not need to be called out just because they are women. It's bullshit. Women are doing fine competing with men. Women are earning more than men in corporate America, women are keeping their jobs at a higher rate than men in the recession, and, Adam, when it comes to making money from blogging, the mommy bloggers knock the ball out of the park. So what's up with segregating women? What is the point?

As a reminder, I'm still looking for data on men's vs. women's salaries in America. I asked this question before, and LemmusLemmus pointed me to a 1999 study cited by Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate that suggests it's dead even. Based on Trunk's examples, women actually make more than men. I'm interested to see if anyone has data showing that women make less than men for comparable work.

Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler's libertarian paternalism needs a better name.

I'm glad to see someone pointing out Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler's abysmal branding of their potentially powerful theory. A Chicago Tribune article says:

[Thaler and Sunstein] co-wrote a book last year called "Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth and Happiness." In it, they put forth the idea that by shrewdly shaping the context in which individuals make decisions—something they call "choice architecture"—the government can help individuals eat better, plan wisely for their retirements and avoid polarizing arguments on issues as diverse as gay marriage and motorcycle helmet laws. The book and its ideas were quickly embraced by Britain's Conservative Party as a possible successor doctrine to Thatcherism. ... Thaler and Sunstein call their approach "libertarian paternalism," which may explain why the book has attracted less notice here [in America]. But that may change. Many of its Chicago School ideas were echoed by Obama during the presidential campaign and could soon become the playbook for his administration's economic policy. And Obama recently tapped Sunstein to be his regulatory czar, an obscure but potentially influential job.

Sunstein elaborates on the theory:

If a private company, or the government, offers something as the default, a lot of people will stick with it, even if a change is ridiculously simple to make. People often use what we call the "yeah, whatever" heuristic.

Why do defaults have such power? One reason involves inertia. People have a lot of things to think about, and especially when the choice is complicated, they're might well decide not to decide or to procrastinate. Another reason involves suggestion. When an option is described as a default, people often think, someone sensible thought that this is the way to go, and I might as well go along with what they thought.

For instance, Tulsa changed the default setting of its city printers to double-sided; the city estimates it will save over $40,000 a year.

As Sunstein admits, their theory obviously raises serious questions, like, "Who sets the defaults?" See this post if you're interested in answers to some common objections.

Sunstein also admits in that post that one of the main objections is to the name:

Objection: Libertarian paternalism is an ugly and confusing term. Ugh!

Answer: Maybe. Probably. Originally we wanted to call the book Libertarian Paternalism, and no one wanted to publish that book. So we called it Nudge.

The book title is obviously a moot point since the book has been published. But the theory is a dynamic thing that could either thrive or die out. The name could seriously affect the fate of the theory (which could in turn affect public policy).

So what should it be called?

"Libertarian paternalism" is too much of a mouthful. It's just too many syllables. And it's so Orwellian that it's practically begging to be made fun of. "Paternalism," even aside from being blatantly sexist, does not have positive connotations for most people, at least most Americans. (Considering that Sunstein and Thaler's premise is that they're attuned to subtle psychological reactions, I'm surprised they missed this.)

Sunstein explains that people shouldn't take the term to be an oxymoron:

The approach is libertarian in the sense that it preserves freedom of choice. It is paternalistic in the sense that it tries to produce good outcomes for choosers.

Note that I'm not critical of the theory itself. I like the theory, which is why I want it to have a better name.

"Nudge" (which is what Sunstein and Thaler seem to call it on their blog, Nudge) is too breezy. Since it's already a familiar verb, you'd always need to explain what you mean, which would seem to defeat the purpose of a snappy buzzword. And it conjures up a negative image: someone pushing you around (albeit gently).

"Choice architecture"? That's not as bad as "libertarian paternalism," but it's still a mouthful. (The word "architecture" itself is a mouthful -- try saying it 3 times fast.) More importantly, it's too authoritarian. If you take the metaphor seriously, it sounds like there's an "architect" putting everything in exactly the right place, which would seem to contradict the idea of individual freedom.

How about "structured choice"? Or "choice framing"?

You want to suggest that there's this big framework -- not one that's pushing (nudging) you around, but one that's actually inviting, because whether you stick with the default or switch to something else, you'll be able to do what you want.

Or we could just take a cue from Sunstein and call it the "yeah, whatever" theory.

Hmm ... "the avuncular state"?

"Commoner Captures Princess, Blog Version"

Uh, wow.

UPDATE: Annotated.

The skeptic's creed

Metafilter commenter "BrotherCaine" says:

My wife is always saying, "Have the courage of your lack of convictions!" in response to my closeted atheism.

Of course, that would work better with agnosticism.

Cassette-taped musicians

Famous musicians made from cassette tapes by "iri5" (via Drawn!):

No more "war on terror"

Last week, someone emailed a memo to Pentagon staffers telling them to refer to the "overseas contingency operation" instead of the "global war on terror."

The memo supposedly came from the Office of Management and Budget. But an OMB spokesperson denied that any such memo was sent. So that seemed inconclusive.

But now, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has confirmed that "the administration has stopped using the phrase." She says there hasn't been any formal directive against "war on terror," but that the phrase's very absence "speaks for itself."

Does this mean the administration might be going soft on terrorism?

Well, here's a quote that I think sheds light on the issue:

I'm really beginning to believe we should stop the war on terrorism. Not because I'm against the fighting. ...

No, I simply think the war on terrorism may be the wrong war. ...

Terrorism is a means — the intentional use of violence against civilian populations in order to achieve political ends. We're at war with the people seeking those ends. ...

Put it this way: If Syria formally declared war on the United States and (somehow) attacked us with missiles and artillery, would we declare a "new war on ballistic armaments"? Or would we just declare war on Syria and be done with the semantics? If al Qaeda raised an army against us and fought with conventional weapons, would we refrain from firing back — since we are at war with "terrorism" and not with conventional armies?

Now, that quote isn't from anyone in the Obama administration. It's by the well-known conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg, from an article he wrote for the National Review in 2002.

I don't think anyone's ever accused Jonah Goldberg of being soft on terrorism.

Yet a colleague of Goldberg's on National Review, Victor Davis Hanson, is ridiculing the Obama administration for apparently stopping the use of the term. Here's his blog post, in full:

The War is Dead. Long Live the War!

Flash! Neanderthal "War On Terror" is now officially declared over. Flash! Neanderthal Taliban Mehsud promises to hit D.C.!

I'd like to know if Hanson was similarly derisive of Goldberg's statement that we should "stop the war on terror." I'm guessing not.

Hope-based administration

In the midst of an overwritten, over-metaphored piece called "Is Obama skidding or crashing," Penn Jillette sums up exactly how I'm feeling about the Obama administration right now, except for the part about being twice Obama's weight:

President Obama is so damn smart. He just drips smart. He clearly understands stuff that we could never understand. He's trustworthy. ... If I weren't twice his weight, I'd fall back with my eyes closed into his caring arms in one of those cheesy '70s church trust exercises. He could talk me into anything.

Obama tells us that we can spend our way out of debt. He tells us that even though the government had control over the banks and did nothing to stop the bad that's going on, if we give them more control over more other bank-like things, then they can make sure bad stuff doesn't happen ever again. He says we can get out of all those big wars President Bush caused by sending more troops into Afghanistan. And I don't know. I really don't know.

RELATED: This blog post by my mom from right after the financial crisis exploded:

Democrazy.

A typo I just made while trying to IM the line "this shows we don't really have a democracy." The topic was how impossible it is for almost anyone to understand the current financial crisis, how disembodied it is from the presidential candidates we've been so focused on, and how we are forced by the complexity of the system to rely on experts whose reliability we cannot judge.

That was about an IM conversation she and I had in September 2008. I don't think the situation has gotten significantly better since then.

I feel like giving up on reading the news, then checking back in a year or two to see how things went. In the meantime, trying to figure out what's going on seems hopeless.

In defense of lawsuits

They're not so bad, argues former New York Times writer Anthony Lake in that New York Review of Books piece, which is worth reading in full. Here's a good point in response to conservative critics of America's supposedly over-litigious culture:

This country is notoriously lacking in safety nets that are taken for granted in other advanced societies. Medical care is guaranteed by the state, by one method or another, in Canada and all European countries; in the United States upward of 40 million people have no medical insurance. Around 46 percent of employed Americans get not even one day of paid sick leave—which is guaranteed by law in 145 other countries. Lawsuits are often a substitute for safety nets.

Words of wisdom on blogging -- newness and negativity

1. "Interesting is a much better filter than new."

That's from Jason Kottke on Twitter. He writes the blog called Kottke, which might be the oldest blog of any note (started in March 1998) that's still thriving today.

There seems to be an unwritten rule of blogging that you need to post about something as soon as it emerges as the issue of the day. It's looked down on if you blog about it a week later, or you'll at least need to excuse it with an apology ("I'm sorry I'm late to this, but I just noticed it, and..."). Blogging about a story that's a month old is unthinkable.

For instance, this post on Reason magazine's blog Hit & Run links to a segment from 60 Minutes, but the blogger seems to feel apologetic for doing so:

[This video] aired a couple of weeks ago, but it's a pretty good look at the drinking age debate, with lots of camera time for Amethyst Initiative founder John McCardell. [emphasis added]

"But" it's a pretty good look at the drinking age debate? Why not "and"? Did the debate over the legal drinking age really change at all in the few weeks since the 60 minutes segment aired?

I know it's petty to pick on this one person's word choice, but it's symptomatic of a general problem in blogging. Sure there'll be an issue here and there that's so timely it only really makes sense to blog it right away. But don't most things worth talking about stay interesting for a while?

If something that's a couple weeks "old" is too out of date for you, you certainly wouldn't have much interest in, say, reading a book.

So I plan to keep breaking this unwritten rule of the blogosphere; that is, I'll blog something that doesn't cross the "new" threshold as long as it crosses the "interesting" threshold. Even a subject that's centuries old isn't off limits; a fortiori, it's OK to blog something from last year.


2. "People get a hit of energy when they are negative about something."

That's from Gwyneth Paltrow in an interview, in response to a question about her blog.

That explains a lot about blogging in general, and especially comments sections on blogs.


UPDATE: I just noticed that this was my 250th post. A quarter of the way to 1,000!

How important is racism in America today?

John McWhorter gave an extensive answer to that question in a recent interview with Bill Moyer on PBS.

When I originally posted this, I was using just a YouTube clip that McWhorter had posted to his own blog. I typed up my own transcription because I didn't know there was any existing transcript. Since then, the YouTube clip has been taken down, but the video and transcript are on PBS's website.

Here's the video. The relevant discussion starts at about 10:15.

Here's PBS's full transcript. But for the sake of posterity, I've kept my own abridged transcript from the original post:

MOYER: To what extent do you think those realities you just mentioned can be traced to racism?

McWHORTER: Ooh, that's a good question.

MOYER: . . . By far disproportionate number of black kids in prison.

McWHORTER: Hideous, yeah.

MOYER: Disproportionate number of black people living in poverty. When we talk about those realities, do we have to talk about race anymore, or is that behind us?

McWHORTER: There is certainly what's called "societal racism" and "institutional racism." "White privilege" is the way sometimes it's more provocatively put. And those things are there. But my question is whether or not we can eliminate those things within any timespan that is . . . logical. So, yes, I know there are arguments that there is "institutional racism." But in terms of helping people who need help, it seems that there are very practical, hands-on strategies that we can use, and that we can teach people to use, that have a more interesting effect to me than crusading against the fact that society isn't fair.

Basically, I can't imagine the playing field ever being completely level. I don't know how you can create that.

And this is the crucial thing: I think that descendants of African slaves in the United States are the only group in human history who have insisted that we can only achieve under perfect or near-perfect conditions.

Now, for me to have said that in 1950, now that would have been pushing it. But in terms of the way it is now? Life is never fair.

And I want to stress once again: I know there is racism in the United States. Tulia, Texas . . . anyone can Google that.

But the fact of the matter is that when you look at the problems that the black community has, tracing them to racism has gotten so abstract that, really, I don't see, and maybe I'm missing something, but I don't see how we could convince a significant proportion of the American population that racism was the main issue anymore.

And more to the point, if you could take away racism right now . . . Racism's gone! The problems we are talking about would still be there. So I think that racism is important, but not as important in 2009 as helping people who need help. . . .

Sometimes I think we have to learn not only from history 100 years ago, but from history a few news cycles ago. The common wisdom . . . not long ago was that Barack Obama couldn't win. That there was still enough racism "out there" that these people in diners talking about how they would never vote for a black man were going to tip the election. And you know, they didn't, and they didn't even come close. We have to learn from that in thinking about what's "out there," as it's often put.

And what's most important? Not what's "out there." We all know what's "out there." You can find it. Look for it, and you'll find it. It might be next door to you. . . . Does it matter in 2009? And I'm suggesting that these days, it's not one of our larger problems. . . .

Were we ever thinking that there was going to be an America where there was nothing that you could call racism? Because, we are homo sapiens, and we're wired in certain ways. The idea that we could never have any biases, that we would never process people according to group, that there would never be some people who are more troglodytic on this thing than others -- I don't think that that corresponds to any kind of reality. We have made amazing strides. But the idea that we can ever have none? I don't know, we'd have to be a different species. . . .

The black president was elected. That settles it. Many people don't like that.

MOYER: With a lot of white votes, by the way.

McWHORTER: With a lot of white votes. And so many people don't like that that really settles the position in the middle. But that's where the conversation is always going to be.

Music Friday unplugged

Here are a few acoustic versions of songs I've blogged before:

Mika - "Grace Kelly." (Previously - MySpace - Wikipedia.)





My Brightest Diamond - "Inside a Boy." (Previously - MySpace - Wikipedia.)




Regina Spektor - "Fidelity." (Previously - MySpace - Wikipedia.)

If you play this performance back to back with the album version, you'll hear how she finesses each little piece of melody in the live version as if she were just creating the tune on the spot. She's never on autopilot.

The problem of evil and animal suffering

My previous post talked about attempts to solve the problem of evil by appealing to free will. As I discussed, there are lots of general problems with that approach.

But you can make the problem of evil particularly acute by focusing on animal suffering. Let's assume there's no human being around to observe the animal, so that we rule out even a theoretical possibility that a human might learn some sort of lesson. For example, before humans even existed, there were animals experiencing pain. Can you reconcile this fact with the existence of a benevolent god?

A couple of logical but unappealing possibilities spring to mind. One is: "Animals simply don't have any awareness, feelings, etc., so their suffering isn't bad -- or, rather, it doesn't even make sense to talk about them suffering, just as it doesn't make sense to talk about a rock suffering."

At the other extreme: "Animals are conscious, they have free will, and they have souls. So, if God and evil are compatible on the theory that God gave us free will (so that we could be virtuous), then the same thing applies to animals."

I don't think most people find either of these extremes plausible. Most people seem to think animals are at least minimally conscious in that they can feel pain (for instance), but aren't as robustly conscious as humans -- they don't have free will or souls. (Of course, many philosophers prefer not to talk about anyone having free will or souls, but I'm trying to approach this in Christian-ish terms because of the problem of evil's salience within Christianity.)

OK, let's put all that to the side for now. Let's assume for the sake of argument that Leibniz's best-of-all-possible-worlds theory is correct -- that is, suffering is justified in the long run by the existence of free will, because free will is a precondition for virtue, and freedom entails the freedom to cause harm. Let's also assume (since I think most people agree) that animals don't operate at such a sophisticated level: unlike humans, they aren't capable of attaining virtue by exercising free will.

Doesn't it follow that animal suffering is a greater evil than human suffering?

In a typical debate over the moral status of animals, someone on the pro-animal side will make the point: "Animals, like humans, can feel pain. That gives them moral status — even if they don't have human intelligence, humans still have a responsibility to avoid cruelty to animals when possible."

The response is then going to be: "Even if you're right that both humans and animals can feel those initial stabs of pain, that overlooks a crucial distinction. Only humans can intellectually reflect on the experience over time. We have this profound experience that animals don't have."

Those who make this latter point often seem to assume it's an argument for caring more about human beings. On the contrary, though, our ability to reflect and "build character" — take Anne Frank's poignant conviction in the underlying goodness of humanity, for instance — seems to mitigate our suffering. Animals are left merely having suffered, without gaining anything from the experience.

"What kind of [president] brings a teleprompter to a [prime-time] news conference?"

Ummmm...

(Via SireSays.)

Does free will solve the problem of evil?

I've been enjoying Bertrand Russell's concise refutations of influential philosophical arguments in his book History of Western Philosophy. Here's Russell's refutation of Spinoza's theory that your misfortunes only seem bad from your self-centered perspective, but cease to be problematic when seen as part of the universe as a whole:

I cannot accept this; I think that particular events are what they are, and do not become different by absorption into a whole. Each act of cruelty is eternally a part of the universe; nothing that happens later can make that act good rather than bad, or can confer perfection on the whole of which it is a part.

Now here's his refutation of Leibniz's argument that there's a benevolent God who made this "the best of all possible worlds." Leibniz said the best possible world would contain free will, so God created a world with free will, which explains why bad things happen: they're human acts of free will. There are many obvious problems with this argument — for instance, there's a lot of bad stuff in the world that's not caused by human action. But Russell's refutation is particularly clever:

A Manichaean might retort that this is the worst of all possible worlds, in which the good things that exist serve only to heighten the evils. The world, he might say, was created by a wicked demiurge [i.e. a demon], who allowed free will, which is good, in order to make sure of sin, which is bad, and of which the evil outweighs the good of free will. The demiurge, he might continue, created some virtuous men, in order that they might be punished by the wicked; for the punishment of the virtuous is so great an evil that it makes the world worse than if no good men existed.

It's a commonplace to ridicule Leibniz's view that God has ensured that we live in "the best of all possible worlds." I mean, Voltaire made fun of it in his novel Candide, so it must be wrong. I'm guessing that people will balk at the "best of all possible worlds" idea when phrased like that, but if you phrase it more gently — "Things work out for the best" — it seems hugely influential.

I agree with Russell's response to Spinoza: cruel acts aren't transformed into good by being absorbed into the whole universe. This might be why I'm generally indifferent to religion. Unlike many secularists, though, I don't believe that cruelty and suffering are "just there" and don't have any larger meaning in the grand scheme of things. I don't have any more interest in an "It's all meaningless" view than in an "It's all for the best" view. What I do believe is that even if things that happen in the world do have some kind of ultimate meaning, the suffering is still there, and it shouldn't be rationalized away.

This explains the overwhelming instinct, cutting across political lines, that torture is just wrong, period. Even those who argue for exceptions to society's general "don't torture people" rule tend to rely on scenarios where the suffering caused by torture is far outweighed by preventing others from suffering -- the classic "ticking bomb," etc. This still implies that suffering itself is the basic unit that we're looking at in making moral assessments. So people are quibbling over a very narrow exception — maybe an important exception, but not one that calls into question the fundamental "torture is bad" consensus.

And so, no one takes the position: "Hey, go ahead and torture as much as you like! It's sure to be a net plus in the end — it'll be a learning experience, or it will be a ringing affirmation of our own free will, or something." Well ... no one applies this to human beings. But it's regularly applied to God. Bizarrely, God is held to lower moral standards than humans are.

UPDATE: Church of Rationality remarks on that last sentence: "John Althouse Cohen puts in another application to Bartlett's Familiar Quotations..."

UPDATE: Continued here.

Obama's prime-time press conference

- President Obama says we need to take on "drug cartels that have gotten completely out of hand." As opposed to the reasonable drug cartels?

- He seemed to get an extra (uncharacteristic?) burst of enthusiasm when he said: "That whole philosophy of persistence is one that I'm going to be emphasizing in the years to come when I'm in office." (Rough quote from live broadcast.)

"This is a big ocean liner. It's not a speed boat. It doesn't turn around immediately."

UPDATE: Mickey Kaus points out that of the reporters who asked Obama a question stated a blatant falsehood: "1 in 50 children are now homeless in America." As Kaus says, "This is one of those statistical assertions that you know is BS before you even set out to show it's BS." But click here if you're interested in the details.

How to tell if you're listening to a smart person

I had never thought of this ad hoc intelligence test -- Stephen Dubner on the Freakonomics blog says:

As a writer, I enjoy listening to people speak and, when they’re in the middle of a particularly interesting sentence, I try to imagine how I’d like to see it finished.

Usually I am disappointed. But with some select people, the payoff is far greater than I could have imagined. They have something to say that’s remarkably insightful or unexpected or even just articulate in a way that takes your breath away.

I could do without the overstated "takes your breath away" rhetoric, but aside from that, it seems like a useful test, though there's an obvious risk of becoming overly judgmental.

Dubner gives 3 examples: President Obama, classical pianist Glenn Gould, and some sports guy who wrote a book about some other sports guy. Click the above link if you're interested in the specific explanations.

Dubner adds:

In each case, the subject spoke with what I can only characterize as total intelligence — a lot of mental horsepower, to be sure, but also nuance, precision, conceptual and practical elements combined in the same sentence, and psychological astuteness.

I guess, therefore, that if I were asked to define what it means to be “smart” in this day and age, those are the characteristics I’d list. I know a lot of super-brainy people who don’t express themselves well; I know a lot of psychologically astute people who haven’t a whiff of organization or precision about them; I know a lot of articulate people who can’t see the big picture. But if I were friends with either Obama, [that sports guy], or Gould, I’d have to say that they were the smartest people I know. (Sadly, I’m not.)

I don't understand why he focuses on "President Obama's first press conference" (the prime-time address in early February where he pitched the economic stimulus plan). I'm fine with Dubner using Obama as an example of a smart person. But as for that specific press conference, I agree with this review — it was unusually long-winded and meandering. ("Obama seemed like he was channeling a particularly loquacious combination of Joe Biden, Bill Clinton, and the ghost of Hubert Humphrey. . . . Obama radiated the sense of a leader who has digested too many economic briefings and memorized too many talking points in preparation for his primetime rendezvous with the public.")

It's also weird that he starts out equating intelligence with finishing your sentence with unexpected insight, but he never gives any example of a sentence by any of those 3 people (or anyone else) that ended unexpectedly. So I was disappointed with how he finished his blog post.

As for Dubner's analysis of what makes someone intelligent — "nuance," "precision," "conceptual"/"practical," and "psychologically astute" — I'm not sure. Someone who had all those qualities in their conversation would probably be interesting to listen to. But do they add up to "intelligence"? Maybe they add up to "how to sound intelligent."

UPDATE: My dad has a good intelligence test:

whether a person, if asked to explain himself, is capable of doing so in different, clearer terms than he used the first time.

Unfortunately, it's all too common to see people trying to project intelligence through precisely the opposite approach: persistently explaining things in obfuscatory terms. I keep coming back to this passage from an essay by John Kenneth Galbraith (previously blogged):

Complexity and obscurity have professional value—they are the academic equivalents of apprenticeship rules in the building trades. They exclude the outsiders, keep down the competition, preserve the image of a privileged or priestly class. The man who makes things clear is a scab. He is criticized less for his clarity than for his treachery.

What's so bad about dying languages?

This Washington Post article reports on "endangered languages":

[H]alf of the world's almost 7,000 remaining languages may disappear by 2100, experts say.

A language is considered extinct when the last person who learned it as his or her primary tongue dies. Last month, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) launched an online atlas of endangered languages, labeling more than 2,400 at risk of extinction.

Languages typically die when speakers of a small language group come in contact with a more dominant population. That happened first when hunter-gatherers transitioned to agriculture, then during periods of European colonial expansion, and more recently with global migration and urbanization. The spread of English, Spanish and Russian wiped out many small languages. ...

Extinct languages can be revived, especially when they have been recorded.

"But when you skip a generation, it's hard to pick a language back up again," said Douglas Whalen, president of the Endangered Language Fund, which gives grants to language-preservation projects. "You need a community that is really committed and will bring children up from birth in the second language, even if they themselves are not the most fluent speakers." ...

The Living Tongues Institute recruits youth who are not fluent in their traditional tongue to become "language activists," using digital equipment to document their elders' voices and learn the language themselves. This creates a record and builds pride in the language.

But wait a second — what's the point of all this? What exactly is so bad about thousands of languages becoming extinct?

The most concrete argument for preserving languages seems to be that you can preserve esoteric knowledge that's exclusive to these languages. This may be a general familiarity with the culture that speaks the language, or it may be more specific — the WaPo article talks (somewhat credulously) about secret medicinal remedies passed down from generation to generation.

But if that's really our concern, does it apply only to the past? What about the future? If more people speak a larger number of obscure languages, doesn't that make it more likely that useful information will remain confined to tiny subcultures, depriving the rest of the world of the benefits? So doesn't this concern actually cut against putting moribund languages on life support?

I'm with John McWhorter, who says:

The language revivalists yearn for — surprise — diversity. What they miss is that language death is a healthy outcome of diversity.

If people truly come together, then they speak a common language. We can muse upon a "salad bowl" ideal in which people go home and use their nice "diverse" language with "their own." But in reality, almost always the survival of that "diverse" language means that the people are segregated in some way, which in turn is almost always due to an unequal power relationship — i.e., precisely what "diversity" fans otherwise consider such a scourge.

Jews in shtetls, for example, spoke Yiddish at home and Russian elsewhere because they lived under an apartheid system, not because they delighted in being bilingual. The Amish still speak German only because they live in isolation from modern life, which few of us would consider an ideal for indigenous groups to strive for.

In the end, the proliferation of languages is an accident: a single original language morphed into 6,000 when different groups of people emerged. I hope that dying languages can be recorded and described. I hope that many persist as hobbies, taught in schools and given space in the press, as Irish, Welsh, and Hawaiian have.

However, the prospect we are taught to dread — that one day all the world's people will speak one language — is one I would welcome. Surely easier communication, while no cure-all, would be a good thing worldwide. There's a reason the Tower of Babel story is one of havoc rather than creation.

IN THE COMMENTS: Slippery slope.

Also, my dad says:

If people confined themselves to their "traditional" languages (and what does that mean? proto-Indo-European?) I'd be wearing today a long black coat, a felt hat, long curly earlocks, and a fringed garment, and speaking English haltingly, with a heavy accent, as a second language. I wouldn't like that. John wouldn't exist, and I wouldn't like that either.

What Katha Pollitt doesn't get about Ross Douthat's sexual conservatism

Katha Pollitt has an article in The Nation that begins:

Liberal blogger men are thrilled with the New York Times's appointment of 29-year-old Atlantic blogger Ross Douthat to replace William Kristol on the op-ed page.

Why "liberal blogger men"? Because Pollitt thinks that these "men" wouldn't be so "thrilled" about Douthat if they were women. Why? Because Douthat says things like this (quoted by Pollitt — I couldn't find the original source):

[I]t . . . makes adaptive sense for women to have a certain amount of difficulty having orgasms, because then they're more likely to seek out a long-term monogamous partner who knows their body well, which in turn dovetails nicely with the general female interest in having only one partner, the better to keep that partner around when the children come along.

If you Google this quote, you'll see it's been frequently ridiculed on the internet. But I haven't seen anyone, including Katha Pollitt (who sarcastically calls it "thoughtful commentary"), actually explain what's wrong with it.

That passage is an attempt to give an evolutionary explanation for a human trait. I don't know if Douthat is right or wrong, but you don't show that he's wrong unless you give some kind of specific argument beyond sarcastic sneering.

But are the liberal blogger men somehow slanted against women in praising Douthat? I'd say no. A few points:

1. By observing a fact about the world and then providing an evolutionary explanation of it, you're not approving of that state of affairs.

For instance, I can observe that a lot of men commit rape, and I can give an obvious evolutionary explanation for it: men, unlike women, have the physical potential to reproduce as many times as they can have sex. Since women tend to resist consenting to sex, men will have an easier time reproducing if they're willing to violate women's lack of consent. But does giving this explanation mean that I in any way approve of rape? Of course not.

I've previously blogged Robert Wright's broader point in his book The Moral Animal:

[W]e're all puppets, and our best hope for even partial liberation is to try to decipher the logic of the puppeteer. . . . Just because natural selection created us doesn't mean we have to slavishly follow it's peculiar agenda. (If anything, we might be tempted to spite it for all the ridiculous baggage it's saddled us with.)

2. I doubt many "liberal men" are "thrilled" about this observation by Douthat, from his highly publicized article entitled "Is Pornography Adultery?":

As we try to make sense of the brave new world that VHS and streaming video have built, we might start by asking a radical question: Is pornography use a form of adultery? . . .

[A]dultery is inevitable, but it’s never been universal in the way that pornography has the potential to become—at least if we approach the use of hard-core porn as a normal outlet from the rigors of monogamy, and invest ourselves in a cultural paradigm that understands this as something all men do and all women need to live with. In the name of providing a low-risk alternative for males who would otherwise be tempted by “real” prostitutes and “real” affairs, we’re ultimately universalizing, in a milder but not all that much milder form, the sort of degradation and betrayal that only a minority of men have traditionally been involved in.

Now, I'm a liberal blogger man, as Pollitt might put it. And I disagree with Douthat's take on pornography. Yet, reading the pornography article makes me glad the NYT chose him as their new columnist. It's possible to learn from people you disagree with, or at least admire their willingness to take unpopular positions.

3. As Matthew Yglesias (one of the liberal blogger men Pollitt criticizes) points out, he can endorse Douthat as the columnist without endorsing everything Douthat has written:

I think that conservatives such as Ross Douthat are regularly wrong about a wide variety of important topics. Thus, instances of them being wrong can be easily produced. . . . That said, . . . I don’t think it makes one a traitor to progressive politics . . . to think it’s a good thing when conservatives-who-offer-more replace conservatives-who-offer-less.

Pollitt openly disagrees with Yglesias on that point: she wishes Bill Kristol had stayed at the NYT because he's "a dull, complacent apparatchik who set forth the Bush line in all its fact-free glory." The problem is, it's hard to have a useful debate when one side doesn't make the best possible case for itself. If you're a liberal and you really believe in the merit of your liberal views, you should want them to be pitted against the most thoughtful conservatives, even if (especially if) they sometimes take positions that make you uncomfortable.

Punk epistemology: "All I know is that I don't know nothing"

Facebook friend status update, referring to the old punk band Operation Ivy:

_______ is on an Op Ivy bender.

That makes me want to listen to some "Knowledge" -- an Operation Ivy song covered here by Green Day (whose first live show ever using the name Green Day was also Operation Ivy's last show, according to Wikipedia):




Cf. Socrates in Plato's Apology:

For this fear of death is indeed the pretence of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being the appearance of knowing the unknown; since no one knows whether death, which they in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good. Is there not here conceit of knowledge, which is a disgraceful sort of ignorance?

And this is the point in which, as I think, I am superior to men in general, and in which I might perhaps fancy myself wiser than other men -- that whereas I know but little of the world below, I do not suppose that I know.

Back to the modern day ... don't forget about Operation Ivy's bassist, Matt Freeman, who went on to be the bassist for Rancid. The greatest punk bassist in the world (parental advisory: explicit lyrics):