Submitted to a Candid World

Editor’s introduction: I would like this post to become the first in a series about the nature of science, and its intersection with law and public policy. I have a great deal of interest in the subject - in fact, my note for my Journal is on this very subject - and I think some of the readers here have the same interest. Since it’s an ongoing series, please leave a comment if you like the topic, don’t like the topic, or have an idea for the way the topic should go.

The Problem of Pseudoscience

Science is dangerous. In the context of a public policy debate, the invocation of science to justify, oppose, or recontour the issue in controversy either removes an element of the debate from contest, or elevates it to another level, where (ideally) objective fact must be met by objective fact, subject to the procedural rigors of the scientific method. In most cases, though, proffered scientific arguments are accepted at face value: science connotes objectivity and trustworthiness, and requires expert training to give it a closer look. Since most of us lack that level of training, we must trust the expert’s assertion that the science is correct: the use of science to debate public issues, then, carries with it an implicit promise that the expert’s scientific knowledge is being used correctly, in good faith, and with the benefit of experience. The scientist has to act as the fiduciary of the public, leading the untrained wisely and without prejudice or bias. In return, in the abscence of proof to the contrary, we assume good faith on the part of the social-minded scientists.

Thus, the problem of pseudoscience. While we in the public sphere are conditioned to trust science, and scientists, the potential for largescale abuse of trust lurks just beneath the surface. As Answers in Genesis and Expelled have shown us, dressing anything up as “science” automatically puts your opponent on weaker footing, because they then have to rebut the contention of special expertise or disprove the “science” scientifically, before even addressing the merits of the underlying argument. While science may be a wise policy guide, to the unprincipled, it can become a shield for bad ideas. (more…)

About half of the internet has been trying to sort out and properly react to Barack Obama’s alleged turn to center on FISA, the death penalty, and a few other issues.

The other half would’ve joined the party, but they were busy captioning pictures of cats.

I’ve resolved the issue to my personal satisfaction by reasoning that Obama’s “rightward turn” might be partly attributed to a heartfelt desire to reach across the aisle and be every person’s president, and partly chalked up to simple politics, both of which are fine by me.  But why listen to a law student when you could listen to a law professor?  Kyron Huigens of Cardozo Law reasons that Obama’s turn is not a turn at all, but rather explained by his principled beliefs in the way the law works.  I think he’s probably on the right path.

And this, my friends, is why you want an “elitist” as a president.  The Bush years have so blinded us by partisan gamesmanship that we’re looking for spin when there may not be any: “what’s that crazy Obama kid trying to prove?”  For once, we might just have a candidate who’s researched the issues, thought long and hard about them, and reached an intellectual conclusion.  He may not be as fun to sit down and have a beer with as George W. Bush, but when the tab comes, at least Barack Obama can calculate the tip.

Sometimes I think that George W. Bush must be either a cruel joke played on us by some malevolent will, or at least a national nightmare from which we shall surely wake. Setting aside his policy errors, the man’s personal foibles are too hilarious to be real. Bush’s last G8 summit, just completed, caps a legacy of painfully awkward international faux pas’ worthy of “Office” legends Michael Scott or Dwight Shrute. In honor of the end of this era of free comedy, a short recap of the depths of lapsed dignity and decorum plumbed by our President, in the form of lessons learned:

• Apparently, heads of state are unaccustomed to free massages, or, perhaps, to being groped without notice by fellow world leaders. At an earlier G8 summit, upon meeting German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Bush proceeded to give her a back rub, in the manner of Buster Bluth. “Heyyy, Chancellor…” Watch the video; her appalled facial expression is well worth the click.
• In what surely must come as a shock, British Monarchs don’t like being flirted with, or winked at (video).  Especially by the self-styled black sheep of a formerly respected political family.
• Making stereotypical ethnic jokes is a cool way to defuse the tension of a first meeting.  Hey, Gordon Brown liked it.
• Italians don’t speak Mexican Spanish: apparently Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi doesn’t answer to the Spanish word, “amigo.”
• When an assembled group of world leaders spends years trying to get you to own up to the damage you’re causing to the environment, they don’t like being reminded of how little you care what they think. This suggests that, “goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter,” might not be the best choice of parting words.

International diplomacy just might be one of those places where a little elitism goes a long way.

Modern art museums don’t always work for modern art.  At least, where the point of the art is subversion, heavy-handed critique, or commentary that’s more contextual than can be reduced to wall text, the atmosphere of the museum doesn’t always serve the art well.  The New York Times comments - and I agree - that, no matter how awesome the Met’s rooftop gallery exhibition of Jeff Koons may be, it loses the imposing and threatening meaning that Koons intends.  Koons’ pieces become familiar and lovable in their own right.  It’s like trying to cuddle with an intellectual bear (and somehow succeeding); it’s not natural!

But that’s not to say it’s not good in its own right.  I think Koons does well in his new context, with its new meaning, and my heart isn’t so hard as to turn my back on a scenic cityscape and a comforting atmosphere just because it offends my inner art critic.  But, some recontextualizations of modern art are a little more damaging to the artist’s intent, and cut off the entire dialogue between art and audience that the artist intends.

For example - the Whitney doesn’t let you take pictures in the galleries.  Obviously, that didn’t stop me, but to ban the photographing of modern art is to interrupt its “train of thought.”

"After Walker Evans, After Shirley Levine" (2008), Pixels on iPhone Flash Memory

Photography is an obsession of modern art.  Much better minds than my own have wondered aloud about the meaning of this new art form, and what “creativity” means in the post-photographic art world.  Sherry Levine, on display in the Whitney and rephotographed to the right, is one of the artists who poses that very question, while also questioning what “art” is if “creativity” is so muddled.  Levine “rephotographed” Walker Evans’ iconic images of the Great Depression and, without the slightest modification, published them sub nom “After Walker Evans.”  Levine suggests that the meaning of creativity, and consequentially of art, is simply the inflection of the artist upon the work, rather than any “kick galvanic” of creativity.  Thus, by interacting with Evans’ original, and capturing that interaction in her new photograph, Levine creates (at least under this definition) new “art.”  And since I think rephotography is silly - a thought experiment, rather than a new form of art - I’ve rephotographed Sherry Levine’s piece, in violation of the Whitney’s rules.

Ideally, a modern art museum should pose the question posed by the artist, and allow viewers to answer, encouraging viewers to do as much as possible, short of damaging the pieces.  At least for Levine’s work, allowing viewers to photograph the piece would facilitate the piece’s meaning.  Even if you don’t know the context of what Sherry Levine is doing, there’s a certain self-consciousness associated with photographing a photograph in a museum that Levine would probably appreciate. By framing and holding inviolate Levine’s “authentic” rephotographs, the Whitney cuts off the message, and misses the point.

Risky business.

America loves a maverick.  Born as a confederacy and forged in a revolution, we’re (unsurprisingly) suspicious of strong government, and, as a consequence, identifying oneself as a “rogue” who “plays by their own rules” is one of the best image patterns a politician can undertake to create. That’s part of the reason that America - and, until Obama came along, the mainstream media - fell in love with John McCain.  He’s not afraid of crossing the aisle, and in 2000 represented the moderate, true conservative wing of the Republican party, when Bush tried to take it down the road to theocracy.

But, there’s reason to doubt that a maverick legislator would a maverick executive make.  The role of the Executive is vitally different from, and often completely at odds with, the role of the role of the legislator.  That’s part of the reason we’ve not elected a sitting Senator since John F. Kennedy.  While the skills transfer between roles, they don’t necessarily transfer well, or at least unmodified.

For one, while a maverick legislator spends their time opposing, or at least redefining, the Institution, a sitting president is the Institution.  Yes, that’s merely a rhetorical trick.  But there’s something to it. The constituency, duties, and ties of a President are vastly different and more binding than those of a Senator.  There’s a certain inertia and restrictiveness to the Presidency, owing to the interdependency of the office: a President is not his own man (or woman) in the way a Senator is.  This is not to say that a “maverick” can’t change the Office, but it’s a different and more difficult task, not to be assumed of even the most experienced legislator.

And, there are decisions that simply do not accommodate a “maverick” outlook on things.  How a conservative-leaning maverick’s outlook on the Supreme Court differs from a conservative’s perspective on the issue is completely beyond me.  And, as we know, McCain isn’t trying to be a “maverick” on that issue - he’s outright told us he’ll appoint extremist conservatives, with the help of one of America’s true nutbags (Brownback).  And the stakes can’t be higher for that one.

Being a Barack Obama fan is a bit of a roller coaster.  The man does almost everything right.  Everything.  He compromises where necessary, he’s open and honest about religion, and he periodically knocks one out of the park with a grand, populist gesture… sometimes, perhaps, too often.

But oh, the pain.  I submit to you two ironclad rules of American politics, both drawn from the anti-elitist, anti-intellectual meme that has run silently throughout American politics since the Founding, and now resurfaced with a vengeance:

• Americans do not like being talked down to by our politicians, even if the politicians doing the lecturing are sympathizing with our inadequacies. The Romans hated Cato the Elder (no matter what Plutarch said), and, sadly, we too hate the self-improvement centered politicians, wherever they may crop up.  We want an avatar, not a lecturer, regardless of how badly we may need the latter.
• Americans do not like being compared negatively to Europe. The Europeans are like America’s older siblings, and a politician who measures us by Europe strikes a decidedly parental and patronizing tone.  Avoid.  But it’s worse: comparisons with Europe cut against our foundation myth, which centers upon us being the perfection of Europe, the city-upon-a-hill that rose above religious and ideological differences to welcome all to the land of the free.  Stacking America against Europe sells the story out.  If you need an example of the disaster that can spring from avoiding this rule, anyone with a memory longer than three years ought to recall how Kerry’s French connection immediately set him at odds with the people.  A smart politician would steer clear of that third rail.

And, while Obama’s a smart politician… I guess we all make mistakes.  Criticizing Americans for only being mono-lingual?  And using French, of all languages, as the example?  Really?  Ugh.  Let’s not have a repeat of the Great Windsurfing Disaster of Aught-Four.

Also, a very good comment on elitism by Collin, here.

I’ve always found it amazing that the Republican party, whose platform stipulates a top-down personal morality and consists largely of pushing through tax breaks for the wealthy, has managed to label the Democrats as elitist. I suppose we have the Reagan realignment to blame, whereby lower-class voters were suckered from the Democrats (who promised them a better economic future) to the Republicans (who promised them a chance to talk about religion), but the co-option of the “elitist” label goes even farther. Liberal politicians are viewed as the privileged few, while Yale-educated Republican politicians powered by old Connecticut money waltz into the White House just because they spend a few days a year in Texas. If we were to have an “elitism-off,” and set all the hybrid cars, iPhones, Starbucks double-shot mocha frappucinos (no foam, please), and Barnes & Noble memberships of Democratic politicians against the Martha’s Vineyard vacations of Republican politicians, I believe we Democrats would lose hands down.

Luckily, every now and again, a crack emerges in the spin-coated veneer of the Republican image, and we get a view of what they’re really thinking. Ah, there it is. For worrying about the economy, we’re “a nation of whiners.” Just lovely. If Barack Obama - or one of his staffers - had said that, I’d be able to look out my office window and see it plastered on the sides of buildings already: “OBAMA THINKS YOU’RE A WHINER,” or some such. In fact, Obama has made some comparable slip ups - though they’ve blissfully since faded - and that was pretty close to the reaction. I seriously doubt Phill Gramm’s comment will get the same play on the Fox News ticker. But time will tell.

And, on a side note, I’m surprised to see that people are still looking into the issue of whether McCain is even eligible for the presidency, owing to the peculiarities of his birthplace. He’ll run, regardless of the issue, and it would be a political suicide to try to derail the McCain campaign on a legal technicality. The fact is, sometimes the law just doesn’t matter.

Any way you cut it, Manhattan is exceptional, especially in its residential composition. Standing at the dawn of the 21st century, Manhattan is almost entirely gentrified. Even Riis’ famous slum houses are on the edge of an up-and-coming neighborhood, and are soon to undergo the standard Manhattan life cycle (from poor to hipster to student to wealthy to yuppie to Trump), with inevitable termination in prosperity. Here in New York City, the rich few from all across America amazingly converge to become the wealthy many. This unique composition does funny things to society… and, also, to religion.

First, there seems to be a conscious attempt by New York Christian organizations to shed their association with mainstream Christianity. Whether it’s true or not (and I take no stance) there is a common belief that the more educated you are, the less likely you are to be religious. Religious groups in Manhattan have taken that assumption, and the assumption that most of Manhattan qualifies as rich and towards the upper end of the educational heirarchy, and run with both. But don’t take my word for it. The results are plain to see.

The above advertisements both attempt to connect with believers by making a distinction between christianity and Christianity, catering to the belief that some elements of mainstream Christianity are odd, and then conspicuously shedding those elements. We have advertisements for church services in a rock theater, and a plug for nondenominational meditation and prayer, both unique methods of religious expression suggesting an attempt to win over the demographic of those New Yorkers who are suspicious of organized religion, but retain lingering spirituality. I imagine that this is Christianity tailored for the educated elites… at least, tailored to fit the theory of what the educated elites want… perhaps as a last defense against a perceived slide into atheism.

To a certain extent, we may be looking at the shape of things to come, at least within a subset of society. While it’s common for people (indeed for whole groups) to become less religious, groups of people only rarely become less spiritual. Especially in the post-religious right era, it will be important for religion to evolve towards a focus on spiritualism over ritual. These elite-centered liberal religious groups seem to be gambling their future on the belief that, while the educated may have become suspicious of organized religion, the spiritual core of humanity is immutable. I don’t pass on whether this is good or bad: I just report. You decide.

And then there’s the Christian graffiti. I’ve seen my fair share of graffiti, ranging from the absurd and terrifying (”The KKK is on the rise,” at a gas station in rural Alabama) to the hilarious (a complex, multi-author discourse on homophobia in America, in a Borders bathroom in Houston). But never before have I seen so much religious graffiti as I have here in Manhattan.

The question is, why? The answer, I think, is that graffiti is emblematic of the outsider. It’s a tool of subversion, by which the common and the ordinary become appropriated to the use of the extraordinary. If religion is changing to be more spiritual and less religious, we’re likely to see the doctrinal, dogmatic elements of religion - the soothsayers, etcetera - go underground. Sometimes literally:

Oddly enough, I don’t see much middle ground here. While I don’t doubt it exists, it’s odd that the most visible aspects of Christianity in Manhattan are the creationist/rapture-ready pamphleteers and the ultra-reform spiritualists.

I wrote about this earlier at RationalWiki.

I fundamentally don’t understand why a Democrat wouldn’t vote for the party’s candidate. Now that the shouting of the primaries is over, I think we have bigger problems to solve, and below is my attempt to puzzle out why I so fundamentally don’t understand the continued anger on the Clinton side.

America’s party system emerged as a tacked-on addition to a functioning democracy, a way of minimizing transaction costs in the run-up to elections, rather than a way of allocating power, as in a parliamentary system. Here in America, unlike much of Europe, we vote for people not parties, and our very own Cincinnatus thought, early in the Republic’s history, that it ought to stay that way. While Washington’s exhortation to avoid parties staved off the pallor of partisanship for a brief while, it entrenched in the American mindset the idea that when we vote we are voting for an individual, complete with that individual’s personal failings (without which no-one is complete). Since campaigns are therefore “personal,” they risk becoming overly personal, meaning the party platform - the only thing that matters in purely partisan systems like England - becomes less important than the one poor, flawed individual we’ve picked to lead the party to victory.

That ought to be self-evident to anyone who watched the Clinton years, and saw President Bill Clinton’s dubious personal legacy overwhelm his incredibly successful professional legacy in the public eye, irrevocably tainting Al Gore and sending America into its current tailspin under the auspices of 2000’s “winner.” And now, on the eve of the Democrats’ redemption, we’re risking letting personal grievances, personal offenses at candidate Barack Obama’s imagined elitism, and lingering anger over a protracted campaign season divide us, to the detriment of the ideology that unites us all. Even at reputable, ex-Kos sites, it’s all about the primaries and emotion, not about the issues. Barack Obama’s imagined airs of elitism shouldn’t matter more than the cause of creating a progressive America in the 21st century.

That we want a person and not a platform, I think, is a fundamental problem with the way we see elections, and the way we conduct politics. The candidate and the politician, as the servant of the people, need only serve the state wisely, legally, and with the best interests of the constituents at heart.

The candidate, as Washington put it, ought to represent the “the delegated will of the nation”: when the candidate steps into the office, they do not so much become the state, as they become the office. The personal qualities melt away, or give way at least, to the office and the candidate’s promise to the American people of how that office’s duties will be discharged. The candidate is the avatar of the ideology he or she represents and campaigns vowing to defend. The candidate is not your best buddy, or always your first choice. But while avatars come and go, the ideology remains constant, and also remains the ultimate good of the political campaign. To place the ideology below the avatar, I think, is the ultimate treason: for a person to give up on the Democrats because Hillary lost, and because they don’t like Barack Obama, is to lose sight of the very essence of the Presidency and of politics.

One of my regular commenters recently noted the upswing in pro-Hillary, anti-Obama rhetoric among WordPress’ politics blogs (thanks for the tip!). That’s a disappointing trend, but the actual sites he pointed to are even more disappointing, ranging from the racist to the delusional. I’ve noted before - just click that little “previous post” button above you - that it’s partly worrying, but mostly confusing, to see so many people turn from the Democrats upon Obama’s nomination. It suggests to me that the Clinton supporters who cling to her candidacy were never really about the issues in the first place. America is at a crossroads, and to let anger and resentment at Hillary’s loss defeat us in our last best chance to undo the damage of the Bush years borders on the absurd. It’s cutting off the nose to spite the face, it’s throwing a temper tantrum, it’s..

Irresponsible.

More on the worst offenders, below the line. (more…)