It's a funny thing that I see sometimes-- often-- coming from lawyers: the notion of law and order as the only viable way of doing ... much of anything. We, of all people in our society, arguably some of the most individually powerful in our society, refuse to see the limits on the exercise of our power. We represent the avenues, the channels, through which legal change (or stasis) tends to flow, and we like to think of ourselves as necessary, indispensable, for the advancement of ...
... most anything.
It's foolishness, of course. Law-abiding behavior is not the only way to bring about change; it's just the form that we hope change will take, because that involves the least upset to our lives. In the past, change has worn the face of chaos, many, many times. Power does not come only, or even mostly, from the law, and it is only through great effort that we keep power flowing mostly through lawful channels. In some sense, it is more natural for power to be wielded and abused freely by those who possess it than for that power to be limited by, say, constitutional principles. Our "great experiment," our constitutional, representative democracy, is a system operating forever under pressure. Too much pressure overall, or too much in the wrong place, and it can break-- and the greatest foolishness of all is to think that our nation is in any way immune from that kind of event.
The words "American exceptionalism" are getting brandished about by the right wing with enthusiasm, these days-- suggesting, essentially, that American leadership is ordained and demanded by God or destiny. These same people tend to cast the "Occupy Wall Street" movement as a pack of vicious scofflaws incapable of getting anything done.
I think that the first of these attitudes will be seen by history as a horrendous, ironic mistake: America can be strong through care and balance, through careful guardianship of our government and our role in the world. For us to act the part of the Blues Brothers, on a happy-go-lucky "mission from God," is to throw away the exact carefulness that our system demands of us.
I think that ignoring the second, much like ignoring or dismissing the "Tea Party," is a similarly dire mistake, a failure to recognize the signs of internal strain. And the more lawless the protests become, the stronger the challenge they pose to civil authorities, the more they should be recognized for the warning they represent.
What is coming, precisely, I do not know, but rather than sneering that the OWS activists need to learn that the way to "get things done" is "through the courts and legislature," we need to make sure that those routes are a viable method of bringing change about. Law and order need not collapse entirely for the next page of history to be written in a fair few buckets of blood, but it does need to fail on some level. Rather than declare confidently that it can't or won't, the more productive course seems to be making sure that it doesn't.
Monday, November 7, 2011
Friday, October 7, 2011
Human Machinery
Government.
... as a concept, it's something we tend to think of as a distant force: at best, a sort of distant, mechanical "thing"; at worst, a malign "beast" squatting in the dark and nibbling at our tax money. To a certain extent (as I've discussed before), this is a calculated illusion: it's in the interests even of those branches of government that have means of enforcing their edicts that don't require action by other branches of government to appear to be, in John Adams' phrase, a "government of laws, not of men." To a certain extent, an "ideal" bureaucracy would function nearly like a computer: it would have certain functions, which it would mechanically fulfill except where its instructions call for it to be less-mechanical.
As a culture, we seem to have developed a habit of portraying government workers as either ruthlessly efficient, power-hungry, or inept. It's similar to how lawyers are portrayed: to see Hollywood tell it, the legal community often seems to be made up of people who functionally are their professions. But of course, we're not: we're people with jobs, not a job (or a title) that wears ten thousand faces.
The same is true of anyone else.
So, naturally, the reality falls short of the ideal-- but I don't think that's a wholly bad thing. Government, seen up close, is like any other human institution: it's made of people, and thus organic and squishy. It's a flesh of human interaction stretched over what is supposed to be a solid, ordered skeleton. Sometimes its purpose (to manage a great mass of humanity) becomes corrupted because it is too mechanical. Sometimes it becomes corrupted because, being composed primarily of people, it is not mechanical enough.
Too warm. Too cold. Too simple. Too complex. People are like that, and that trait of ours flavors everything we do. We get emotionally involved, we handle things badly, we forget stuff, we screw up.
I bring this up now mostly because of the ongoing political hoo-ha over the size and scope of government, and because of encounters with people in the position of having to deal with aspects of this "machine." The idea of government as a "beast" seems to rest on a sense (in our deeply individualistic culture) that the government is somehow nevertheless a single "thing." The more closely I look at it, the less it looks like any coherent single entity. It's not a single "beast," not even a mythical, many-headed hydra. It's less like a creature, and more like clockwork geography, a sort of cross between a mass of gears and a populated landscape.
And, in theory, it's supposed to serve us. It's a tool, one that's supposed to work for us all. Maybe it does, and maybe it doesn't, but again I find myself wondering what the average "Tea Party" member (more like Whiskey Rebel, really) thinks the alternative is, what sort of flower will bloom most vigorously in the absence of that tool's influence, however imperfect that influence might be.
It's not Ma & Pa's Corner Grocery, that's for sure. There's another kind of human machinery out there, and it doesn't work for "us," unless "we" have money to lend it. It works for its shareholders, to exclusion, and where the governmental machine does not extend its squishy, wobbly gears, this other type of machine is free to thrive.
... as a concept, it's something we tend to think of as a distant force: at best, a sort of distant, mechanical "thing"; at worst, a malign "beast" squatting in the dark and nibbling at our tax money. To a certain extent (as I've discussed before), this is a calculated illusion: it's in the interests even of those branches of government that have means of enforcing their edicts that don't require action by other branches of government to appear to be, in John Adams' phrase, a "government of laws, not of men." To a certain extent, an "ideal" bureaucracy would function nearly like a computer: it would have certain functions, which it would mechanically fulfill except where its instructions call for it to be less-mechanical.
As a culture, we seem to have developed a habit of portraying government workers as either ruthlessly efficient, power-hungry, or inept. It's similar to how lawyers are portrayed: to see Hollywood tell it, the legal community often seems to be made up of people who functionally are their professions. But of course, we're not: we're people with jobs, not a job (or a title) that wears ten thousand faces.
The same is true of anyone else.
So, naturally, the reality falls short of the ideal-- but I don't think that's a wholly bad thing. Government, seen up close, is like any other human institution: it's made of people, and thus organic and squishy. It's a flesh of human interaction stretched over what is supposed to be a solid, ordered skeleton. Sometimes its purpose (to manage a great mass of humanity) becomes corrupted because it is too mechanical. Sometimes it becomes corrupted because, being composed primarily of people, it is not mechanical enough.
Too warm. Too cold. Too simple. Too complex. People are like that, and that trait of ours flavors everything we do. We get emotionally involved, we handle things badly, we forget stuff, we screw up.
I bring this up now mostly because of the ongoing political hoo-ha over the size and scope of government, and because of encounters with people in the position of having to deal with aspects of this "machine." The idea of government as a "beast" seems to rest on a sense (in our deeply individualistic culture) that the government is somehow nevertheless a single "thing." The more closely I look at it, the less it looks like any coherent single entity. It's not a single "beast," not even a mythical, many-headed hydra. It's less like a creature, and more like clockwork geography, a sort of cross between a mass of gears and a populated landscape.
And, in theory, it's supposed to serve us. It's a tool, one that's supposed to work for us all. Maybe it does, and maybe it doesn't, but again I find myself wondering what the average "Tea Party" member (more like Whiskey Rebel, really) thinks the alternative is, what sort of flower will bloom most vigorously in the absence of that tool's influence, however imperfect that influence might be.
It's not Ma & Pa's Corner Grocery, that's for sure. There's another kind of human machinery out there, and it doesn't work for "us," unless "we" have money to lend it. It works for its shareholders, to exclusion, and where the governmental machine does not extend its squishy, wobbly gears, this other type of machine is free to thrive.
Friday, September 23, 2011
(Juris)Prudence
Ever wonder why judges wear robes? It's theater, really. Literally, theater.
It works like this: the legislature makes the rules; the executive enforces the rules; the judiciary decides the disputes. The courts, then, are decision-makers of a very specific sort: they decide disputes as theoretically neutral arbiters. That's it. That's all. That's what they're "for." And as a result, they're curiously toothless. That is, they lack an enforcement arm of their own. Others are supposed to comply with their decisions, and they do have the power to order the executive branch to lock people up who don't go along with the court's orders ("contempt of court").
But what if the executive refuses?
A court has no army. It controls no funding. Its power comes from the regard with which its decisions are held, the willingness of more "political" branches of government to comply with its decisions. Basically, an executive with sufficiently strong backing from society could tell the court to go hang, and the court would be left huffing and making angry faces. The only solid measure of the court's power, then, is the respect with which it is viewed, the credit given its decision-making-- its "legitimacy" as the final arbiter. Refusing to carry out a final decision by the judiciary has to be socially and politically unthinkable: if the court gets no respect, it has no power.
As a result, there's an element of theatrics to the daily affairs of any court, from "all rise" to the dress code of judges, court personnel, and lawyers, to the layout of the courtroom. In general, the higher the court, the more seriously it takes the theater. Local, state-level trial courts are less formal than the state courts of appeals, which are less formal than the state supreme courts.
Our own Washington State Supreme Court is housed in a building literally called the "Temple of Justice." The structure pretty much lives up to its name.
Federal courts generally take the game more seriously than state ones, I presume because the federal government is something more psychologically distant and impersonal, less a part of most people's day to day experience, and considered "superior" to the state courts. An example of this is the deeply formalized "well of the court," an expanse of only-too-inviting carpet between counsel's tables, the judge, the jury, and the witness, through which no one may walk while court is in session, no matter how convenient it might be to do so.
If all of this sounds silly or unnecessary (or like a bit of a fraud), consider another "legitimacy-dependent" institution: the dollar. Money doesn't have to work very hard for us to think of it as valuable, maybe, but it's fundamentally an abstraction of wealth given value only by our agreement to treat it as such. While a dollar bill doesn't wear robes, it does wear George Washington on its front and the Great Seal on its back. Of course, if we dispelled that particular illusion and started turning our nose at any system of exchange more abstracted than barter, bad things (well, worse things) would happen to our economy.
The power of the court is no less illusory, but also no less important. It plays games of legitimacy in order to maintain its power, but maintains its power in order to maintain its function; without it, things would be much worse.
It works like this: the legislature makes the rules; the executive enforces the rules; the judiciary decides the disputes. The courts, then, are decision-makers of a very specific sort: they decide disputes as theoretically neutral arbiters. That's it. That's all. That's what they're "for." And as a result, they're curiously toothless. That is, they lack an enforcement arm of their own. Others are supposed to comply with their decisions, and they do have the power to order the executive branch to lock people up who don't go along with the court's orders ("contempt of court").
But what if the executive refuses?
A court has no army. It controls no funding. Its power comes from the regard with which its decisions are held, the willingness of more "political" branches of government to comply with its decisions. Basically, an executive with sufficiently strong backing from society could tell the court to go hang, and the court would be left huffing and making angry faces. The only solid measure of the court's power, then, is the respect with which it is viewed, the credit given its decision-making-- its "legitimacy" as the final arbiter. Refusing to carry out a final decision by the judiciary has to be socially and politically unthinkable: if the court gets no respect, it has no power.
As a result, there's an element of theatrics to the daily affairs of any court, from "all rise" to the dress code of judges, court personnel, and lawyers, to the layout of the courtroom. In general, the higher the court, the more seriously it takes the theater. Local, state-level trial courts are less formal than the state courts of appeals, which are less formal than the state supreme courts.
Our own Washington State Supreme Court is housed in a building literally called the "Temple of Justice." The structure pretty much lives up to its name.
Federal courts generally take the game more seriously than state ones, I presume because the federal government is something more psychologically distant and impersonal, less a part of most people's day to day experience, and considered "superior" to the state courts. An example of this is the deeply formalized "well of the court," an expanse of only-too-inviting carpet between counsel's tables, the judge, the jury, and the witness, through which no one may walk while court is in session, no matter how convenient it might be to do so.
If all of this sounds silly or unnecessary (or like a bit of a fraud), consider another "legitimacy-dependent" institution: the dollar. Money doesn't have to work very hard for us to think of it as valuable, maybe, but it's fundamentally an abstraction of wealth given value only by our agreement to treat it as such. While a dollar bill doesn't wear robes, it does wear George Washington on its front and the Great Seal on its back. Of course, if we dispelled that particular illusion and started turning our nose at any system of exchange more abstracted than barter, bad things (well, worse things) would happen to our economy.
The power of the court is no less illusory, but also no less important. It plays games of legitimacy in order to maintain its power, but maintains its power in order to maintain its function; without it, things would be much worse.
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Looking Lunatic
Lately, I've been getting a lot of my world news from the BBC. As a news source, it's got a lot of merits: it's free, it's generally insightful, it's used as a primary news source by much of the world, and it gets high marks for accuracy. You could do a lot worse, so long as you don't mind getting your news from what is, deep down, an organ of the British government.
One oddity for an American viewer, though: it's a foreign (if friendly) news source with a foreign (if friendly) perspective that closely monitors, and informs much of the world about, domestic American affairs. It's like going to your neighbor's house and looking, from there, back in through your window to see the state of your own living room. This being the United States we're talking about, this is presuming that your own house is a grand but decaying edifice and that your family is making an art form out of dysfunction. It's a fascinating view, not least because you get a sense of exactly what the neighbors find most fascinating about being your neighbors.
In our case, I get the impression that they're pretty damned fascinated by our love affair with the personal arsenal. At time of writing, this has been dominating the "most read" column on the BBC website for the last couple of hours (it just dropped from #1 to #2, actually, unseated by the latest from Libya).
I was about to write that the U.S. is not unique in the world in terms of gun ownership, but it turns out I'd have been dead wrong, there. With 88.8 privately-owned guns per 100 residents as of 2007, we lead the world in guns per capita, though I have to wonder how accurate the statistic from Yemen (54.8 guns per 100 residents) can possibly be.
American justifications for widespread private hand-cannon ownership are well-documented, well-debated, and, at this point, well-entrenched. Self-defense, self-reliance, protection against an overreaching national government-- we're kind of big on the "well-armed individual self-determination" thing right now, and the recent Heller decision confirms that the Supreme Court is following this same political script. Somewhere in all of this, we as a culture seem to have lost interest in the debate. It's decided: private gun ownership is a public good, and the occasional massacre no longer seems to stir much debate on the subject-- except, perhaps, whether we should be opening still more venues (college campuses, political events, national parks) to the carrying of firearms.
It really makes me wonder what would be necessary to turn this particular tide-- and to what extent the feeling in much of the rest of the industrial world, which seems to have come down on just the other side of the debate (as with the death penalty), makes us dig in our heels even more. It also makes me wonder just how blind the British must think we are, to be able to undergo these sorts of incidents almost without comment.
I guess we just accept the odd massacre as the price of doing business, these days.
One oddity for an American viewer, though: it's a foreign (if friendly) news source with a foreign (if friendly) perspective that closely monitors, and informs much of the world about, domestic American affairs. It's like going to your neighbor's house and looking, from there, back in through your window to see the state of your own living room. This being the United States we're talking about, this is presuming that your own house is a grand but decaying edifice and that your family is making an art form out of dysfunction. It's a fascinating view, not least because you get a sense of exactly what the neighbors find most fascinating about being your neighbors.
In our case, I get the impression that they're pretty damned fascinated by our love affair with the personal arsenal. At time of writing, this has been dominating the "most read" column on the BBC website for the last couple of hours (it just dropped from #1 to #2, actually, unseated by the latest from Libya).
I was about to write that the U.S. is not unique in the world in terms of gun ownership, but it turns out I'd have been dead wrong, there. With 88.8 privately-owned guns per 100 residents as of 2007, we lead the world in guns per capita, though I have to wonder how accurate the statistic from Yemen (54.8 guns per 100 residents) can possibly be.
American justifications for widespread private hand-cannon ownership are well-documented, well-debated, and, at this point, well-entrenched. Self-defense, self-reliance, protection against an overreaching national government-- we're kind of big on the "well-armed individual self-determination" thing right now, and the recent Heller decision confirms that the Supreme Court is following this same political script. Somewhere in all of this, we as a culture seem to have lost interest in the debate. It's decided: private gun ownership is a public good, and the occasional massacre no longer seems to stir much debate on the subject-- except, perhaps, whether we should be opening still more venues (college campuses, political events, national parks) to the carrying of firearms.
It really makes me wonder what would be necessary to turn this particular tide-- and to what extent the feeling in much of the rest of the industrial world, which seems to have come down on just the other side of the debate (as with the death penalty), makes us dig in our heels even more. It also makes me wonder just how blind the British must think we are, to be able to undergo these sorts of incidents almost without comment.
I guess we just accept the odd massacre as the price of doing business, these days.
Thursday, August 25, 2011
"How could you?"
Imagine for a moment that you've been accused of a heinous crime. No, not murder; worse than that, at least in the public eye. Much worse. It's nothing so sterile as treason. It has a haunting, clinging quality about it, like cobwebs coated in rancid grease. There's no death penalty for it, not even life in prison, but an awful lot of people think there should be. You've lost your spouse, you've lost your children, and your mother can only look at you through the little plexiglass window and say, "I love you, honey; I'll always love you, no matter what," with tears in her eyes and a quaver in her voice.
Are you innocent? Are you guilty? No jury's yet decided, but as the media lingers over every sordid detail of the allegations, its audience, the public, thinks it knows. The judge has expressed concern that the coverage may prejudice the jury. Politicians are making speeches. There's a bill on its way through the legislature with the victim's name on it, to make sure the law comes down harder, in the future, on horrible people like you who do these horrible things, because, clearly, the law is being much too soft.
The public perception is clear: you don't deserve the benefit of the doubt; what you've done is just too heinous. You don't deserve protection. You don't deserve rights. Your guilt is obvious.
For the guilty, we call this justice, and grin snidely as we anticipate the malefactors' treatment at the hands of fellow inmates, who likely view the offense little more kindly than does the public at large-- and are in a position to do something about it.
For the innocent? Well, um, that's....
That's kind of awkward.
We have a handful of crimes like this in our culture, crimes so utterly toxic that to even be accused of one constitutes a kind of exile from the human race, crimes so poisonous that the mere allegation twists the accused into a kind of perverted imp in the public imagination.
And just how vile do you have to be to defend a creature like that? To defend a demon?
Even as the general run of lawyers goes, criminal defense attorneys do not suffer from an over-abundance of public support. Public defenders are maybe an exception, and there are others, but all too often the popular image of a defense attorney is a snot-slick scumball who wields base cunning and legal knowledge in combination with a contemptible lack of morals in order to shield the guilty from the righteous light of justice.
I get asked from time to time why I would want to make my living taking the sides of monstrous people. Would I have defended Gary Ridgway? How about Osama bin Laden? Mussolini? Do I not think that heinous crimes should be punished?
In fact I do, yes, but I do not consider it my place to judge innocence and guilt. This system of ours, this legal system, in which I play a part, is a machine designed for that purpose. It is not perfect, but it's a damn sight better than my own judgment-- or that of any media-fed mob. Therefore I choose to play my part, and to trust it to produce the appropriate outcome.
"But the system's so broken!"
I dare you to come up with a better one.
That may sound like a cop-out, but I'm quite serious. When it works, the American adversarial system guarantees a two-sided argument before an impartial observer. Does it always work as it should? No. But for my money, the defense attorney is the absolute last part of the system you want to fail.
Consider the nightmare scenario above: again, you are accused of a heinous crime, community rallying against you, etc. Now imagine one more person in the mix, one person charged with speaking for you to a court charged with trying your guilt; to a prosecutor fired up with righteous anger, eager to bring swift justice down upon your villainous head; and to a world roaring its approval of the prosecutor's crusade.
This person, this one person, out of everyone in all the world, is charged to be your voice, speaking with an eloquence you do not possess; to be your guide, explaining your situation and options in a system of laws you do not understand; to be your advocate, bound to introduce no lies but to make your case before the court, as you would, yourself, if you could.
And this, your only champion in all the world, turns away in disgust, just like everyone else.
For whatever reason, this fault, this absence, in your trial is never noticed, or is declared insignificant. They say you are guilty. If you are, your guilt remains untested, and you will be punished on the basis of this untested guilt. Perhaps this is only a small difference.
But oh, if you are innocent....
Monday, August 15, 2011
Splinters
By nature, we are a basically tribal species-- and not designed for particularly large tribes, either. That the human brain can only care for about 150 people at a time has been understood for a while, and now it turns out that even Facebook can't expand that number.
This should come as a surprise to absolutely no one, considering the sort of limited success we've had as a society trying to convince ourselves to care about people starving overseas / in another state / downtown.
At base, it seems human beings are best-designed to live in small-ish, tight-knit groups. One of the largest challenges of civilization has been to try and extend our loyalty beyond our immediate circle of 150 friends. One of the first stages of a typical American education is to soak our children's brains-- positively saturate them-- in a shared American identity.
It doesn't always take. We have "retribalized" entities splitting off all the time, and now it seems we are in the process of tribalizing our whole political system.
Considering some of the ways in which human beings can act towards fellow humans who are not "of us," this is a potentially serious problem. Unfortunately, fracturing into tribal entities comes naturally to us, whereas bodies as large and diverse as nation-states do not, so much.
The late Marshall McLuhan made something of a career out of charting the forces that bring us together and tear us apart. Indeed, his phrase, "the medium is the message," refers to the psychological effects, the underlying "message," inherent to various forms of media. The written word (at least when using an alphabet, rather than pictograms) creates meaning-- lasting, durable meaning-- out of individually-meaningless units: letters. Reasoned arguments are assembled in this way using letters and words like the interlocking cogs of a Swiss watch, and when the medium becomes available to a wider audience through the use of the printing press, the written word soon ceases to be a tool only of the elite. It's a herald of rationality and, perhaps a little less kindly, rationalism.
Contrast this to the television, in which words flow by in an "oral" stream: ephemeral, impressionistic, emotionally effective (and affective), but difficult to pin down, hold still, and analyze. This makes it an absolutely gorgeous marketing tool. It does have its limits, of course. The recent Bush administration was absolutely masterful at using television (WMD's in Iraq, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and on and on), but found Hurricane Katrina too much to keep control of.
And then, of course, we have the internet: text-based, yet kaleidoscopic, uniting us as a single globe, yet so easily dividing us into rabid packs of (for example) feral PS3 worshippers and XBox cultists.
... Of course, it's possible to belong to more than one "tribe," and the internet doesn't place geographical limitations on where its tribes come from, which may make open warfare between at least some forms of internet partisan difficult.
Would that our political divisions in the U.S. were as geographically diverse: when tribe A views tribe B as evil, and tribe B sees tribe A as insane, living in separate enclaves seems like a good way to make the situation worse.
... I say as a liberal living happily in Seattle. Ah, well.
This should come as a surprise to absolutely no one, considering the sort of limited success we've had as a society trying to convince ourselves to care about people starving overseas / in another state / downtown.
At base, it seems human beings are best-designed to live in small-ish, tight-knit groups. One of the largest challenges of civilization has been to try and extend our loyalty beyond our immediate circle of 150 friends. One of the first stages of a typical American education is to soak our children's brains-- positively saturate them-- in a shared American identity.
It doesn't always take. We have "retribalized" entities splitting off all the time, and now it seems we are in the process of tribalizing our whole political system.
Considering some of the ways in which human beings can act towards fellow humans who are not "of us," this is a potentially serious problem. Unfortunately, fracturing into tribal entities comes naturally to us, whereas bodies as large and diverse as nation-states do not, so much.
The late Marshall McLuhan made something of a career out of charting the forces that bring us together and tear us apart. Indeed, his phrase, "the medium is the message," refers to the psychological effects, the underlying "message," inherent to various forms of media. The written word (at least when using an alphabet, rather than pictograms) creates meaning-- lasting, durable meaning-- out of individually-meaningless units: letters. Reasoned arguments are assembled in this way using letters and words like the interlocking cogs of a Swiss watch, and when the medium becomes available to a wider audience through the use of the printing press, the written word soon ceases to be a tool only of the elite. It's a herald of rationality and, perhaps a little less kindly, rationalism.
Contrast this to the television, in which words flow by in an "oral" stream: ephemeral, impressionistic, emotionally effective (and affective), but difficult to pin down, hold still, and analyze. This makes it an absolutely gorgeous marketing tool. It does have its limits, of course. The recent Bush administration was absolutely masterful at using television (WMD's in Iraq, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and on and on), but found Hurricane Katrina too much to keep control of.
And then, of course, we have the internet: text-based, yet kaleidoscopic, uniting us as a single globe, yet so easily dividing us into rabid packs of (for example) feral PS3 worshippers and XBox cultists.
... Of course, it's possible to belong to more than one "tribe," and the internet doesn't place geographical limitations on where its tribes come from, which may make open warfare between at least some forms of internet partisan difficult.
Would that our political divisions in the U.S. were as geographically diverse: when tribe A views tribe B as evil, and tribe B sees tribe A as insane, living in separate enclaves seems like a good way to make the situation worse.
... I say as a liberal living happily in Seattle. Ah, well.
Monday, August 8, 2011
Who Says?
If the universe itself (as an entity distinct from ourselves) has little or nothing to say, where does that leave us? Who gets to decide the "right" and "wrong" of things if God hasn't got much to say?
The overly-easy answer is to say "no one"-- that there is no such creature as morality. This is the "obviously wrong" answer my philosophy professors always used to get into a snit about me playing devil's advocate for (and the one I presume people are thinking of when some pollster asks them whether atheists can be good people). It's the only moral code I've ever heard of whose logic is wholly consistent and universally applicable. Admittedly, that's because it has the same effect in moral logic problems as multiplying by zero has in mathematics: the product is always the same.
... Though frankly it seems to me that the lesson here is not to try to make a logic problem out of morality.
The better answer, and more in keeping with the fact that human beings do seem to have an innate moral capacity, is to take a step back and stop looking to the heavens for answers that will only ever come from the little bits of the universe walking around on two legs down here: the ape that stood up. Current thought on the subject analogizes the human moral capacity with our capacity for language: it's innate (absent a disability), but programmable. It's a biological "slot" that gets filled through cultural instruction and experience.
That this "slot" appears to exist should tell us something about the nature of human morality. Evolution doesn't work on the basis of celestial right and wrong; just go ask a tarantula hawk about the morality of using live tarantulas as larders for its babies (a process that makes gavage look positively humane). Evolution functions on the basis of what works. So, if our moral capacity is an evolved trait, that suggests that morality isn't about pleasing any god you care to name so much as it is about how we survive. We're social animals, so it's necessary for us to be able to function effectively as a group as well as looking out for our own personal genes. It doesn't take a great deal of imagination to see how a group of proto-humans with no innate compunctions about stealing from, cheating, and murdering each other would have trouble surviving to reproduce.
In essence, morality is about not doing ourselves in.
So, if the universe "communicates" through consequences and the key consequence of immorality appears to be a tendency not to survive as well, why do I say that the universe is silent?
Although our moral capacity appears to be innate, there is still a lot of room for us to develop different culturally and/or legally-enforced codes and weigh moral qualities differently. Few, if any, modern societies regard outright theft, treachery, or murder as morally right, at least when applied within that group's own bounds (groups of religious extremists, and I'm not only talking about extremist Muslims, here, apparently just sharply limit the circle of people they identify themselves with). However, those same societies differ greatly on subjects such as who should pay how much for public projects; whether intentionally "standing out from the crowd" is a celebration of individual identity or an unseemly, even arrogant display; and whether man's best friend is best served high-grade kibble or served in a fortifying autumn stew.
I say the universe is silent because, when it comes to a great many of the questions we disagree on, it is. Human societies have the privilege, and the burden, of finding their own answers to these questions. Some may have good consequences, some bad; most will serve up a blend of both. No one will be right about everything, all the time; the world doesn't work like that.
I say the universe is silent, also, because in the process of working through our issues, of finding a balance of policies and ideas that serves our purposes in our increasingly complicated world, it is essential, absolutely vital, that we resist the temptation to assert the mandate of heaven.
We are beings of subjective viewpoint; we cannot be otherwise. We absorb information through our senses, but we process it in the context of our own inner universes. Beliefs as to what God wants create their own reality. They require no evidence beyond the foundational documents of the faith, and they reshape the believer's understanding of the universe until that which contradicts the belief is automatically a misunderstanding, an error, or even a deliberate deception.
I am not saying that religions that look to an outside source for moral guidance are "bad." I am saying that they filter the believer's perceptions, sometimes to the point where the believer and the secular world occupy, in effect, different universes that just happen to overlap. From a practical, secular perspective, the results are problematic.
Even if God exists, His desires are obscure unless you are lucky enough to have the exact "right" god-- and of course, all believers consider their own god to be the right one.
The American founders had the right idea when they separated church and state. Human culture and human law are worldly artifacts to be arranged in accordance (we hope) with the function of this world. The alternative is to craft our lives in accordance with a vision of the universe at least partially detached from the one we have to live in, and damn the consequences.
The overly-easy answer is to say "no one"-- that there is no such creature as morality. This is the "obviously wrong" answer my philosophy professors always used to get into a snit about me playing devil's advocate for (and the one I presume people are thinking of when some pollster asks them whether atheists can be good people). It's the only moral code I've ever heard of whose logic is wholly consistent and universally applicable. Admittedly, that's because it has the same effect in moral logic problems as multiplying by zero has in mathematics: the product is always the same.
... Though frankly it seems to me that the lesson here is not to try to make a logic problem out of morality.
The better answer, and more in keeping with the fact that human beings do seem to have an innate moral capacity, is to take a step back and stop looking to the heavens for answers that will only ever come from the little bits of the universe walking around on two legs down here: the ape that stood up. Current thought on the subject analogizes the human moral capacity with our capacity for language: it's innate (absent a disability), but programmable. It's a biological "slot" that gets filled through cultural instruction and experience.
That this "slot" appears to exist should tell us something about the nature of human morality. Evolution doesn't work on the basis of celestial right and wrong; just go ask a tarantula hawk about the morality of using live tarantulas as larders for its babies (a process that makes gavage look positively humane). Evolution functions on the basis of what works. So, if our moral capacity is an evolved trait, that suggests that morality isn't about pleasing any god you care to name so much as it is about how we survive. We're social animals, so it's necessary for us to be able to function effectively as a group as well as looking out for our own personal genes. It doesn't take a great deal of imagination to see how a group of proto-humans with no innate compunctions about stealing from, cheating, and murdering each other would have trouble surviving to reproduce.
In essence, morality is about not doing ourselves in.
So, if the universe "communicates" through consequences and the key consequence of immorality appears to be a tendency not to survive as well, why do I say that the universe is silent?
Although our moral capacity appears to be innate, there is still a lot of room for us to develop different culturally and/or legally-enforced codes and weigh moral qualities differently. Few, if any, modern societies regard outright theft, treachery, or murder as morally right, at least when applied within that group's own bounds (groups of religious extremists, and I'm not only talking about extremist Muslims, here, apparently just sharply limit the circle of people they identify themselves with). However, those same societies differ greatly on subjects such as who should pay how much for public projects; whether intentionally "standing out from the crowd" is a celebration of individual identity or an unseemly, even arrogant display; and whether man's best friend is best served high-grade kibble or served in a fortifying autumn stew.
I say the universe is silent because, when it comes to a great many of the questions we disagree on, it is. Human societies have the privilege, and the burden, of finding their own answers to these questions. Some may have good consequences, some bad; most will serve up a blend of both. No one will be right about everything, all the time; the world doesn't work like that.
I say the universe is silent, also, because in the process of working through our issues, of finding a balance of policies and ideas that serves our purposes in our increasingly complicated world, it is essential, absolutely vital, that we resist the temptation to assert the mandate of heaven.
We are beings of subjective viewpoint; we cannot be otherwise. We absorb information through our senses, but we process it in the context of our own inner universes. Beliefs as to what God wants create their own reality. They require no evidence beyond the foundational documents of the faith, and they reshape the believer's understanding of the universe until that which contradicts the belief is automatically a misunderstanding, an error, or even a deliberate deception.
I am not saying that religions that look to an outside source for moral guidance are "bad." I am saying that they filter the believer's perceptions, sometimes to the point where the believer and the secular world occupy, in effect, different universes that just happen to overlap. From a practical, secular perspective, the results are problematic.
Even if God exists, His desires are obscure unless you are lucky enough to have the exact "right" god-- and of course, all believers consider their own god to be the right one.
The American founders had the right idea when they separated church and state. Human culture and human law are worldly artifacts to be arranged in accordance (we hope) with the function of this world. The alternative is to craft our lives in accordance with a vision of the universe at least partially detached from the one we have to live in, and damn the consequences.
Thursday, August 4, 2011
Suited in Seattle
Seattle, as a city, does not seem to put much stock in going nattily attired, choosing rather to make a casual dress-style into a badge of community. We've got our outliers, naturally, but, on the whole, we seem to like serviceable, marginally attractive, casual clothing. It fits in with our self-image as a community: educated yet egalitarian, practical yet relaxed. To a great degree, a casual style of dress is a mark of common identity among us, a way of declaring our common humanity. We're not here to "do business" so much as to make lives for ourselves.
There's no better way to see this pattern than to try stepping out of it for a bit. And one need not step "down" to step "out."
There are communities within communities, and law is a conservative profession. Much as I'd love to grow my hair back out to the base of my spine and wear a Utilikilt to the office, and much as this is technically allowed (it's my hair and my office, dammit), there is a host of reasons why this isn't a good idea, chief among them that I would very much like to make some money some time soon. It's a matter of marketing: being a lawyer calls for looking businesslike, even in a city where billionaires typically wear fleece.
The thing is, wearing a suit seems to edit me right out of that very same community.
Years ago, I used to make a habit of waving to strangers whose eyes I happened to meet on the street. While I thought at the time that this was a nice and friendly gesture, recognizing our mutual humanity and so on, it yielded a harvest of odd looks, and for good reason: it was a violation of our social mores. Waving, as a friend would, at someone who is not a friend hints at a connection that does not exist, expresses a level of intimacy that has not been reached. It's like hugging random people in the grocery store.
It makes you look touched in the head.
Nodding, now, that's the thing. Nodding at someone whose eye you catch is a simple courtesy, a recognition of the other's existence as a sentient being. It comes across to nobody as odd, and is commonly returned by everyone from bankers to the homeless (though you're apt to have a pan handled at you immediately after).
But, now, here's the catch: it doesn't work anywhere near as well if you're wearing a suit. Seriously.
Wearing a suit seems to put the wearer into another category of humanity, and anyone who thinks we're anywhere near a classless society even here on the West Coast needs to give this a try. To wear a suit, and nod, is to be more readily nodded at by other people in suits, less by casually-dressed Seattlites (to whom the wearer no longer appears to be "one of us"), and to be looked at funny by anyone within shouting distance of the poverty line.
The suit is a mark of status. It's a mark of Serious Business, an undertaking Seattlites seem to look at with maybe just a touch of scorn. It's a mark of wealth, and never mind whether the clothes are of good quality or bad.
It's also an invitation to resentment.
"Hey rich man! Can't you spare me five bucks?"
Not that I can afford to buy the local homeless lunch every day to begin with, but it's difficult to be subjected to this sort of reaction without beginning to regard the source less as a hapless fellow human being and more as a threat.
Designating one's self an outsider to some degree hath its advantages, however. Many a lawyer in the area dresses in a button-up shirt and sweater, staying closer to the "casual" Seattle look while still maintaining that businesslike image in part. It may be possible to generate more business through a "more professional than thou" demeanor, especially in the courtroom. I find myself looking forward to getting the chance.
But, now, here's the catch: it doesn't work anywhere near as well if you're wearing a suit. Seriously.
Wearing a suit seems to put the wearer into another category of humanity, and anyone who thinks we're anywhere near a classless society even here on the West Coast needs to give this a try. To wear a suit, and nod, is to be more readily nodded at by other people in suits, less by casually-dressed Seattlites (to whom the wearer no longer appears to be "one of us"), and to be looked at funny by anyone within shouting distance of the poverty line.
The suit is a mark of status. It's a mark of Serious Business, an undertaking Seattlites seem to look at with maybe just a touch of scorn. It's a mark of wealth, and never mind whether the clothes are of good quality or bad.
It's also an invitation to resentment.
"Hey rich man! Can't you spare me five bucks?"
Not that I can afford to buy the local homeless lunch every day to begin with, but it's difficult to be subjected to this sort of reaction without beginning to regard the source less as a hapless fellow human being and more as a threat.
Designating one's self an outsider to some degree hath its advantages, however. Many a lawyer in the area dresses in a button-up shirt and sweater, staying closer to the "casual" Seattle look while still maintaining that businesslike image in part. It may be possible to generate more business through a "more professional than thou" demeanor, especially in the courtroom. I find myself looking forward to getting the chance.
Thursday, July 28, 2011
Nurture 'em? Torture 'em?
It seems that Norway's penal system, the one that a certain politically-motivated mass murderer is apt to end up in, as revealed by a recent article in "Foriegn Policy," is not precisely hell on earth.
What I find most interesting about this, though, is not the view Norway takes of crime and punishment; it's the view we in the United States take of the view Norway takes. That is, if we take the article cited above as our model, incredulity.
"What? Flat screen TV's? Private bathrooms? Fraternization with guards-- unarmed guards, at that? Pretty personal trainers? What?!"
Even as a staunch American leftist, I have to admit that my reaction, my gut feeling, looks an awful lot like the tone of the above-cited article. But should it?
The emotionally-satisfying answer to an act that causes us personal or societal anguish is to punish it, to return pain for pain. This is the approach we take in the United States. The wave may be cresting (we'll see), but for decades, now, we've made it our aim and priority to serve up heaping helpings of (what we mostly justify as) deterrance with a side order (or, perhaps, main course?) of retribution. Oh, we come up with other justifications: isolating a malefactor from the rest of society so that he can't do any more harm is a good one, but that purpose seems a bit undermined by the fact that, even though our recidivism rates are on the high side of frightening (51.4% back in jail within 3 years, by last count, which admittedly isn't all that recent), we don't make it too much of a habit to lock prisoners up (and so keep them away from the rest of us) forever.
So: how does that actually work out for us? Well, let's see: in an index of the entire planet, we have the highest per capita prison population, at 743 prisoners per 100,000 persons. The total overall population was almost 2.3 million as of 2007. Ah-- yes, and we do have that 51.4% back-to-jail rate.
Norway, which seems to so coddle its most terrible people, apparently has 73 prisoners per 100,000 heads. That is, it has less than 10% of ours. Its recidivism rate, which I'm having trouble finding official statistics on (possibly because I don't speak Norwegian), keeps being reported as about 20%. Even accounting for cultural differences, that seems like a serious effectiveness gap.
The sense of justice we've developed in this country seems to glorify instant karma, of a sort: "If you do bad things, bad things will be done to you." We are expected to fear prison in much the same way and for much the same reasons as religious Christians might fear the wrath of an angry God: fearsome retribution. We like redemption stories, but it doesn't seem like we, as a culture, really believe in redemption.
Or, perhaps, we're unwilling to believe that redemption is or ever could be the rule, rather than the rare exception.
Yet, if by treating those who would reform our prisoners as naive, and the prisoners themselves as repeat offenders waiting to happen, we end up fulfilling our own prophecies about them-- if, in fact, we are generating our own repeat offenders using "tough" methods that satisfy our visceral desire to see the wicked suffer, but which, from the perspective of reducing crime, does not work-- which side, really, is being naive?
What I find most interesting about this, though, is not the view Norway takes of crime and punishment; it's the view we in the United States take of the view Norway takes. That is, if we take the article cited above as our model, incredulity.
"What? Flat screen TV's? Private bathrooms? Fraternization with guards-- unarmed guards, at that? Pretty personal trainers? What?!"
Even as a staunch American leftist, I have to admit that my reaction, my gut feeling, looks an awful lot like the tone of the above-cited article. But should it?
The emotionally-satisfying answer to an act that causes us personal or societal anguish is to punish it, to return pain for pain. This is the approach we take in the United States. The wave may be cresting (we'll see), but for decades, now, we've made it our aim and priority to serve up heaping helpings of (what we mostly justify as) deterrance with a side order (or, perhaps, main course?) of retribution. Oh, we come up with other justifications: isolating a malefactor from the rest of society so that he can't do any more harm is a good one, but that purpose seems a bit undermined by the fact that, even though our recidivism rates are on the high side of frightening (51.4% back in jail within 3 years, by last count, which admittedly isn't all that recent), we don't make it too much of a habit to lock prisoners up (and so keep them away from the rest of us) forever.
So: how does that actually work out for us? Well, let's see: in an index of the entire planet, we have the highest per capita prison population, at 743 prisoners per 100,000 persons. The total overall population was almost 2.3 million as of 2007. Ah-- yes, and we do have that 51.4% back-to-jail rate.
Norway, which seems to so coddle its most terrible people, apparently has 73 prisoners per 100,000 heads. That is, it has less than 10% of ours. Its recidivism rate, which I'm having trouble finding official statistics on (possibly because I don't speak Norwegian), keeps being reported as about 20%. Even accounting for cultural differences, that seems like a serious effectiveness gap.
The sense of justice we've developed in this country seems to glorify instant karma, of a sort: "If you do bad things, bad things will be done to you." We are expected to fear prison in much the same way and for much the same reasons as religious Christians might fear the wrath of an angry God: fearsome retribution. We like redemption stories, but it doesn't seem like we, as a culture, really believe in redemption.
Or, perhaps, we're unwilling to believe that redemption is or ever could be the rule, rather than the rare exception.
Yet, if by treating those who would reform our prisoners as naive, and the prisoners themselves as repeat offenders waiting to happen, we end up fulfilling our own prophecies about them-- if, in fact, we are generating our own repeat offenders using "tough" methods that satisfy our visceral desire to see the wicked suffer, but which, from the perspective of reducing crime, does not work-- which side, really, is being naive?
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