Figuring out how to run a sustainable anarchist household (that values time spent washing the dishes and time spent making money as a computer programmer equally) isn’t as headline-grabbing as a downtown smashup. But Seattle has dozens of functional anarchist organizations—or anarchish organizations. Some of them operate in an anarchist way (consensus decision making, a focus on mutual aid instead of competition) but don’t call themselves anarchistic. And even the ones that do are constantly debating how to strive for anarchist ideals within the current economic and political system. (Give me two anarchists, and I will give you a debate on what “real” anarchism means.)

The beauty of that post (read the whole thing!) is that it emphasizes the banal public work that anarchists are constantly engaged in, building civic capacities and consensual organizations and common-pool resources. Shorn of all the rhetoric and utopianism, anarchists are just ordinary people who think that authority requires certain kinds of participation in order to be legitimate. But that’s an old idea.

The problem with the utopian anarchism in the article is Graeber’s speculative optimism: “gradually figuring out new ways of organizing everyday life which will, eventually, make currently existing forms of power seem stupid and beside the point.”

New forms of organizing our lives are not a priori impossible, and in fact that’s the goal we should all be working towards, but it hasn’t happened yet, right? And experiments often (usually, even) fail; that’s why they’re experiments. So in the meantime what do we do about the institutions that are illegitimate but for which there is not yet an alternative? Comply pragmatically? Attack? Disobey in order to demonstrate the violence in the system? Anarchists face a tremendous challenge in the existence and general acceptance of the forms of power they oppose. Not all of them opt to deal with that primarily through novel forms of household budgeting.

Robert Paul Wolff captures the “pragmatic compliance” attitude best in his classic In Defense of Anarchism:

In a sense, we might characterize the anarchist as a man without a country, for despite the ties which bind him to the land of his childhood, he stands in precisely the same moral relationship to “his” government as he does to the government of any other country in which he might happen to be staying for a time. When I take a vacation in Great Britain, I obey its laws, both because of prudential self-interest and because of the obvious moral considerations concerning the value of order, the general good consequences of preserving a system of property, and so forth. On my return to the United States, I have a sense of reentering my country, and if I think about the matter at all, I imagine myself to stand in a different and more intimate relation to American laws. They have been promulgated by my government, and I therefore have a special obligation to obey them. But the anarchist tells me that my feeling is purely sentimental and has no objective moral basis. All authority is equally illegitimate, although of course not therefore equally worthy or unworthy of support, and my obedience to American laws, if I am to be morally autonomous, must proceed from the same considerations which determine me abroad.

But there are other versions. Occupy is one. I’m personally a big fan of Elinor Ostrom’s work on common-pool resource management. But it’s not clear that any of the extant forms of anarchist organization scale beyond relatively small communities of mutual recognition, and it’s not clear that the kinds of social norms that actually work to enforce anarchist forms of organization are any more compatible with autonomy than the ones that ground state and market coercions. I look to Arendt’s account of wards and soviets for one such scaling model, but I’m not particularly enthusiastic about it given the history.

If Wolff is right, then the basic anarchist insight that legitimate authority requires participatory self-governance to be akin to the basic democratic insight and the basic liberal insight, which is why he is ultimately a democratic socialist in his politics and only a philosophical anarchist. (I do think there are adequate responses to Wolff’s specific issues with legitimate political obligations, though.)

I’m quite fond of the anarchists I know in person: we agree on a lot and we work on projects together as needed. I just call myself something different and have less interest in the kind of anti-capitalist end-state speculations that motivate some anarchist folks. Even liberals see value in non-state-centric engagement and institutional experimentation, or they ought to.

But it is striking how many folks (including me) are turned off by what we perceive as Black Bloc-style “propaganda of the deed” but keep coming back to anarchist practices and theorists under other names: civic engagement, small-r republicanism, temporary autonomous zones, etc.

Chris Hedges gave voice to that frustration here:

The Black Bloc movement is infected with a deeply disturbing hypermasculinity. This hypermasculinity, I expect, is its primary appeal. It taps into the lust that lurks within us to destroy, not only things but human beings. It offers the godlike power that comes with mob violence. Marching as a uniformed mass, all dressed in black to become part of an anonymous bloc, faces covered, temporarily overcomes alienation, feelings of inadequacy, powerlessness and loneliness. It imparts to those in the mob a sense of comradeship. It permits an inchoate rage to be unleashed on any target. Pity, compassion and tenderness are banished for the intoxication of power. It is the same sickness that fuels the swarms of police who pepper-spray and beat peaceful demonstrators. It is the sickness of soldiers in war. It turns human beings into beasts.

And David Graeber responded here. He is characteristically loquacious, but makes three major points.

First, that the Black Bloc is not ideologically unitary:

Black Bloc is a tactic, not a group. It is a tactic where activists don masks and black clothing (originally leather jackets in Germany, later, hoodies in America), as a gesture of anonymity, solidarity, and to indicate to others that they are prepared, if the situation calls for it, for militant action. The very nature of the tactic belies the accusation that they are trying to hijack a movement and endanger others. One of the ideas of having a Black Bloc is that everyone who comes to a protest should know where the people likely to engage in militant action are, and thus easily be able to avoid it if that’s what they wish to do.

Second, that the rhetoric of cancer that Hedges uses promotes police-on-activist and activist-on-activist violence:

this is precisely the sort of language and argument that, historically, has been invoked by those encouraging one group of people to physically attack, ethnically cleanse, or exterminate another—in fact, the sort of language and argument that is almost never invoked in any other circumstance. After all, if a group is made up exclusively of violent fanatics who cannot be reasoned with, intent on our destruction, what else can we really do? This is the language of violence in its purest form. Far more than “fuck the police.” To see this kind of language employed by someone who claims to be speaking in the name of non-violence is genuinely extraordinary. I recognize that you’ve managed to find certain peculiar fringe elements in anarchism saying some pretty extreme things, it’s not hard to do, especially since such people are much easier to find on the internet than in real life, but it would be difficult to come up with any “Black Bloc anarchist” making a statement as extreme as this.

Even if you did not intend this statement as a call to violence, which I suspect you did not, how can you honestly believe that many will not read it as such?

And third, that Gandhian non-violence is frequently used ahistorically as a purity test, but that Gandhi’s actual rhetoric and tactics were much less perfectly non-violent than people now pretend:

Over the course of the next 40 years, Gandhi and his movement were regularly denounced in the media, just as non-violent anarchists are also always denounced in the media, as a mere front for more violent, terroristic elements, with whom he was said to be secretly collaborating. He was regularly challenged to prove his non-violent credentials by assisting the authorities in suppressing such elements. Here Gandhi remained resolute. It is always morally superior, he insisted, to oppose injustice through non-violent means than through violent means. However, to oppose injustice through violent means is still morally superior to not doing anything to oppose injustice at all.

And Gandhi was talking about people who were blowing up trains, or assassinating government officials. Not damaging windows or spray-painting rude things about the police.

Certainly he’s right about this: in many ways, the canonization of Gandhi and Martin Luther King have served to create an artificial standard of non-violence that no social movement can ever really achieve and that neither the Civil Rights movement nor the Indian independence movement actually achieved. Plus, if violent repression by the police goes unmentioned in the media but activist violence becomes a regular topic of debate, then it will appear that the only violence is coming from the activists. So long as the Black Bloc seeks anonymity, we cannot know how long they pursued pacifism nor what justifications they might have for changing their minds.

On the one hand, if Occupy is to achieve its goals, it must work today to create the myth that now plagues Gandhi’s and King’s hagiographies. On the other hand, Hedges’ piece could mean that it has already failed or that it will take much more than a single “Spring” to achieve its goals, at least in the US. (On the other other hand, Montreal’s student movements look to have achieved success using similar tactics alongside more traditional solidarities between students and labor organizations.)

You can care deeply about public education, civic education, teenagers’ behavior, or–if you must–gun rights, but there is no basis for arguing that these things are worse than they used to be. I am pretty sure that the argument from decline (argumentum ad declivem?) is a harmful fallacy … although I am not saying that it has become more common of late.

I think this is related to general problems with narratives and persuasion, but at the same time there’s something uniquely self-contradictory about decline arguments. In general, decline stories appear to act like narrative “stubs” or snowclones that short-circuit critical appraisal: the story helps us suspend our disbelief, priming us to expect a certain kind of Protestant framework where renewed effort can restore the lost Golden Age.

Perhaps, too, such narratives help to combat complacency. For instance, runners are taught to push hardest as the finish approaches, and we might look at various kinds of homeostatic cognitive phenomena like risk compensation (the Peltzmann effect) or hedonic adaptation. “We are winning: redouble your efforts!” isn’t quite so motivational as the cornered rats’ refrain: “We fight or we die!”

Levine resolutely refuses to conclude that this is a recent phenomenon (and it’s clearly not.) But if it were, then we might look for historical events that make such narratives particularly resonant. Might not fears of the loss of American empire, in the midst of economic turmoil, produce a general malaise that spills over into areas that are not similarly turbulent? Similarly, these stories might simply be particularly popular as the Baby Boomers reach retirement, since their economic and political ascendancy pressures our entire culture to dream nostalgically of their youth. Certainly I don’t hear many decline fables from the Millennial generation… yet.

Then, too, progress may appear as changes from the status quo that we cannot recognize as progress: civic knowledge skills are flat, but convention indicators of civic engagement and communal trust are down. This may be due to new forms of participation and new solidarities supplanting the older forms, which disrupts our indexes and measurements. Yet online social networks produce different ties than neighborhood associations. So is this progress, stasis, or decline?

Different metrics tell different stories. While Levine is obviously right that per-pupil spending in public education is much higher, outcomes are stagnating. We’re spending much more per student but those students are performing at almost the same level they did when spending was six times lower. At the same time, we educate a much larger group of immigrants and deal with many kinds of developmental disabilities that we once ignored or institutionalized. Is this progress, stasis, or decline?

The NRA’s complaint that gun ownership rights are eroding is the most absurd of these: a transparent effort to preserve motivation in the wake of a string of victories. But are they wrong to notice that the majority of Americans want stricter gun control laws and worry what that bodes for the future of their signature issue? I worry that a similar majority of Americans prefer to let religious employers opt-out of the insuring birth control, even though as a whole the Affordable Care Act is a major victory for women’s rights.

So is that progress, stasis, or decline? I recently learned that Mao didn’t think it was too early to judge the French Revolution: that was a different Chinese premier, speaking of the student movements in Paris in 1968 only three years earlier. Yet some stories are too good to give up on the basis of mere facts, so I echo Mao when I say: it’s too soon to tell.

Blame it on REM

I had the pleasure and discomfort of attending parts of the Reason Rally on Saturday, a march on Washington by atheists, agnostics, and heathens. It was cold, rainy, and frequently quite boring. I mostly went to see Bad Religion, but I enjoyed Eddie Izzard’s routine and Cristina Rad, who responds to theists this way: “You can keep your personal relationship with Jesus Christ. I have a personal relationship with reality.”

But I also found myself disappointed by how much it sounded like a meeting of milquetoast liberalism, and wondering, again, why atheism needs to be a social movement.

It’s popular to quote the study showing that atheists are distrusted about as much as rapists. But this study doesn’t quite pass the smell test: the average atheist is a well-educated white male with plenty of status and more than our fair share of trust.  Asking about atheists without context produces ungrounded evaluations. My students and colleagues don’t treat me like they’d treat a rapist, even though they know I’m an atheist. They treat me like a college professor.

Of course, I had a harder time as an atheist teen, and indeed we see a steady stream of outrageous news about the mistreatment of young atheists as a part of the overall attention to bullying. I suspect, however, that such young atheists face intersecting oppressions as women or homosexuals, or are partly being punished for otherwise transgressing gender norms. First and foremost an atheist teen will tend to be seen as effeminate or tomboyish: as too thoughtful for a man, as too argumentative for a woman. So I’m not convinced that atheist teens as a group have it worse than gay and lesbian teens, even though those groups rate higher than atheists on “trust.” A gay teen atheist might disagree, but in a social setting where all difference is violently bullied, how can we be sure what’s cued the mistrust?

So why cast atheists as victims? Why the mobilization about “coming out of the religious closet”? Recent work by Robert Putnam and David Campbell suggests an answer:

[R]eligion’s influence on U.S. politics has hit a high-water mark, especially on the right. Yet at the same time, its role in Americans’ personal lives is ebbing. As religion and politics have become entangled, many Americans, especially younger ones, have pulled away from religion. And that correlation turns out to be causal, not coincidental.

By using religion to justify their politics, theologically conservative Republicans have conveyed the message to young liberals that they must reject religion in order to reject that politics. Putnam and Campbell show that a lot of the growth in atheism has been traced directly to the growth of politically partisan religion, which is partly why the cause is taken up by the young with such force in the Millennial generation:

The best evidence indicates that this dramatic generational shift is primarily in reaction to the religious right. Politically moderate and progressive Americans have a general allergy to the mingling of religion and party politics. And millennials are even more sensitive to it, partly because many of them are liberal (especially on the touchstone issue of gay rights) and partly because they have only known a world in which religion and the right are intertwined. To them, “religion” means “Republican,” “intolerant,” and “homophobic.” Since those traits do not represent their views, they do not see themselves — or wish to be seen by their peers — as religious.

That’s why a lot of the talk at the Rally yesterday sounded like banal moderate liberalism: increasingly for this generation, that’s what it means to be an atheist. Once upon a time, God was being used on both sides of these arguments. But today, it’s hard for progressive theists to be heard and understood as both progressive and theists, and young people have decided that if they must choose between those two identities, they’d rather be progressive. If you’re in favor of gay marriage, and you look around the world and see that all the objections to gay marriage come from religion, you conclude that you have to chuck God. The same thing for environmentalism, feminism, and the Occupy movement: God has too often appeared publicly on the wrong sides of these debates, and it’s hurting the brand.

I know a lot of wonderful, caring theistic activists who are smart, committed, and reasonable. But as we’ve grown older these theists have either grown more disillusioned with their faith or more disillusioned with their youthful activism. Clearly there was once a way to make those things compatible, and just as clearly something has changed in the larger culture that’s pointing out an inconsistency in the psychic lives of individual citizens.

Theists are increasingly recognizing that the humanists were right: you can be Good without God; and worse, you can be Bad with God. When your co-religionists are Success-Theology, Federalist-Society, Dominionist-Ideology Social Conservatives, you’ve got to acknowledge that faith isn’t sufficient for like-mindedness. But once you decide that faith is irrelevant to the things you thought you cared about, neither necessary nor sufficient for commitment to a political cause or civic engagement with fellow citizens on matters of fundamental concern, where do you go from there? If you’re older, you make it work and ignore the inconsistencies. If you’re a young person, you don’t think you ought to have to stomach that kind of inconsistency. So you don’t:

Consider the growth in the number of people whom sociologists call “nones,” those who report no religious affiliation. Historically, this category made up a constant 5-7 percent of the American population, even during the 1960s, when religious attendance dropped. In the early 1990s, however, just as the God gap widened in politics, the percentage of nones began to shoot up. By the mid-1990s, nones made up 12 percent of the population. By 2011, they were 19 percent. In demographic terms, this shift was huge. To put the figures in context, in the two decades between the early 1970s and the early 1990s, the heyday of evangelicalism, the fraction of the population that was evangelical grew by only about five percentage points. The percentage of nones grew twice as much in the last two decades and is still climbing. Moreover, the rise is heavily concentrated among people under 30, the so-called millennial generation. To be sure, the young are always less religiously observant than their elders; people tend to become more religious when they get married, have children, and put down roots in a community (demographers call this the life-cycle effect). Yet 20-somethings in 2012 are much more likely to reject all religious affiliation than their parents and grandparents were when they were young — 33 percent today, compared with 12 percent in the 1970s.

One-third of all young people have rejected religion because it has been co-opted by the Republican Party. I’m not particularly excited about that, as it doesn’t seem to lead to the world I want, where religion doesn’t play an important role in politics. I don’t care enough about atheism to want people to join me at it, but I care enough about public reason to wish we could have more of the discussions that matter without bad biblical exegesis, Christianist dog whistles, and silly claims about the incommensurability of secular and religious reasons.

One-third of all young people have rejected religion because it has been co-opted by the Republican Party. I’m not particularly worried about that, but theists probably should be. So, theists: what are you going to do about it?

Strange things happen, and we shouldn’t always update our beliefs on the basis of a weird fluke. Bayes theorem is a way to decide how new evidence should lead us to change our beliefs. Put another way, it’s a way to calculate the likelihood that some piece of data is evidence of a conclusion, considering the possibilities of false positives, misleading evidence, and statistically improbable events.

It looks scary, but bear with me:

Here’s what it means: what is the probability of some hypothesis, h, given some piece of evidence, e? Since the evidence might be misleading, we have to consider both the possibility that the evidence is there because the hypothesis is true, and the possibility that the evidence is there even though the hypothesis is false.

Consider a simple example. What is the probability that someone is guilty given that their fingerprints were found at the scene of the crime?

Well, we start with the basics. Either the she’s innocent or she’s guilty, right? We might write that this way:

Why are we putting it like that? By analogy, the likelihood of flipping a coin and getting heads is:

But so far, we don’t have any information about how likely those things are. What we’re looking for is a way to use evidence to tip the scales from the 50/50 of the coin flip. We’re looking for the probability of someone’s guilt, if their fingerprints were discovered. In terms of probabilities, the left side of the equation would look like this:

Pr(Guilt if Fingerprints Discovered)

That’s Pr(h|e). The right side of the equation will look like this:

So what does that mean? In ordinary English, we’re saying that that probability that the person is guilty is equal to the probability that the fingerprints are evidence of her guilt divided by the disjunction of all the possibilities: in this case, her fingerprints were found but she is either guilty or innocent.

The only additional issue is that we have to consider the possibilities of false positives and false negatives. So, what is the probability of guilt, given the evidence? What is the probability of innocence, given the evidence? These accuracy indicators modify the various elements.

But what if there are more than two possibilities? Another example is the likelihood that a high fever is evidence of the flu:

An Alternative to the Algebraic Formulation of Bayes’ Theorem

The same information can be developed as a table:

So out of the total population, how often is the hypothesis true, and how often is it false? Using incidence data, we can make a general statistical claim about the population and then drill down to discover how often the evidence will be present.

For the accused criminal whose fingerprints were found at the scene of the crime, we’d draw the table like this:

Then we’d fill in the total “guilt” and “innocent” figures from crime statistics. Since we’re using historical data, there is always the possibility that something has changed or that the data will be biased in some important way. Still, this can give us a good first approximation. Adding the charts allows us to take advantage of the much more powerful frequentist intuitions for understanding probabilities.

By the way, this post uses an application of Bayes’ Theorem from Sinnott-Armstrong and Fogelin’s Understanding Arguments, where they use it to evaluate the case of Sally Clark. Using this technique to demonstrate the injustice of her case blew my students’ minds. It’s that good. I haven’t yet told them about this case, though!

…[S]cience has realized and affirmed what men anticipated in dreams that were neither wild nor idle. What is new is only that one of this country’s most respectable newspapers finally brought to its front page what up to then had been buried in the highly non-respectable literature of science fiction (to which, unfortunately, nobody yet has paid the attention it deserves as a vehicle of mass sentiments and mass desires).

[...] For some time now, a great many scientific endeavors have been directed toward making life also “artificial,” toward cutting the last tie through which even man belongs among the children of nature. It is the same desire to escape from imprisonment to the earth that is manifest in the attempt to create life in the test tube, in the desire to mix “frozen germ plasm from people of demonstrated ability under the microscope to produce superior human beings” and “to alter [their] size, shape and function”; and the wish to escape the human condition, I suspect, also underlies the hope to extend man’s life-span far beyond the hundred-year limit.

This future man, whom the scientists tell us they will produce in no more than a hundred years, seems to be possessed by a rebellion against human existence as it has been given, a free gift from nowhere (secularly speaking), which he wishes to exchange, as it were, for something he has made himself.

–The Human Condition, 1958, pp. 2-3

I can certainly see how fiction helps to illuminate fact. At least when they are marked out as created-rather-than-discovered, works of fiction can create vivid and meaningful depictions of the world which would otherwise recede into the massiveness of numbers and complexity. As much as I love fiction, however, I’ve never been quite clear why this fictionalized vividness is preferable to the real experiences of real folks, which are also vivid (literally lived), concrete (literally occurrent), and meaningful (literally full of significance for those who underwent them).

At its best, the fictionalization of an event makes it more palatable by fitting it into a pre-arranged narrative structure: a science-fiction fan prefers the rhythms and conventions of a certain kind of story, so she might be better able to understand the horrors of colonialism through the lens of a film like Avatar than she could through an ethnographic account of the post-colonial misery of the Peyizan Yo of Haiti. The great white savior-gone-native in that film stands as an important fictionalized falsehood that must then be overcome, but we must start from somewhere and fiction is frequently an easier beginning.

But would anyone really want to say that the fiction is truer or preferable to the ethnography? I haven’t encountered that argument, at least, outside of hyperbolic Rortyanism. Instead, we occasionally get arguments like Martha Nussbaum’s “‘Finely Aware and Richly Responsible’: Literature and the Moral Imagination.” Because of her specific views on the role of the concrete and particular in informing and grounding our general ethical views, Nussbaum argues that:

“we will need to turn to texts no less elaborate, no less linguistically fine-tuned, concrete, and intensely focused, no less metaphorically resourceful, than this novel [Henry James' The Golden Bowl.]“

But even for Nussbaum, who differs a bit from the dogmatic particularists like Jonathan Dancy, it is possible to “take fine-tuned perception to a dangerous rootless extreme” such that we “delight in the complexity of particulars for its own sake, without sufficiently feeling the pull of a moral obligation to any.” Such imagining “too freely strays, embroiders, embellishes.”

For Nussbaum, then, we turn to fictional texts as a pedagogical exercise to cultivate the kind of moral imagination that attends to and improvises with the concrete: “an ability to miss less, while being responsible to more.” But this pedagogical exercise actually constrains the fictional text:

“We must at the same time remember that artists, as James sees it, are not free simply to create anything they like.”

The fictional text must at least aspire to the complexity of the human phenomena it intends to map. Yet one thing that jumps out of Daisey’s show is how heavy-handed and simplistic it is:

“You will carry it to your homes, and when you sit down in front of your laptops, when you open them up, you will see the blood welling up between the keys.”

This is not the cultivation of a bewildering modern tragedy, where harsh working conditions and negligent dangers are the perhaps-too-high price developing countries pay for their development. It is bullshit, a technical term best analyzed by Harry Frankfurt:

 ‎”One who is concerned to report or to conceal the facts assumes that there are indeed facts that are in some way both determinateand knowable. His interest in telling the truth or in lying presupposes that there is a difference between getting things wrong and getting them right, and that it is at least occasionally possible to tell the difference. Someone who ceases to believe in the possibility of identifying certain statements as true and others as false can have only two alternatives. The first is to desist both from efforts to tell the truth and from efforts to deceive. This would mean refraining from making any assertion whatever about the facts. The second alternative is to continue making assertions that purport to describe the way things are but that cannot be anything except bullshit.”

Deliberate fabrication in order to tell a “better story” doesn’t ever really reveal a greater truth, because it undermines the truth-seeking sensibility. From the perspective of truth seeking, bullshitters who don’t care much about truth seem particularly pernicious: the cost of false vividness is the loss of the trust and credulity that make story-telling meaningful. Of course, some readers may not care much about the truth, either. From some other perspective than truth-seeking, like an aesthetic of care, bullshitting is not necessarily a big deal…. except: what happens when that unconcern with truth leads to a threat to the values of that particular perspective?

One group who care about the truth of these reports are the Chinese who read a report on the iEconomy by the New York Times that included many of the same allegations, better fact-checked than Daisey’s theater piece. Here’s some of what they had to say:

There are two stories about Apple: one is about its brilliant business performance, and the other is about the blood and sweat behind Apple miracles. I strongly recommend that all Apple fans read this. Corporations should bear social responsibilities, and customers should also understand and be responsible to the society. — 花甲小猪

Apple is definitely a vampire factory. But if you boycott Apple, what would those workers eat without demand (for Apple products)? By then they would even lose their job! And now the U.S. is planning to move a chunk of manufacturing back to its soil, as manufacturing costs in China are soaring. What would these surplus workers be facing? The profit margin for the entire Chinese manufacturing sector is thin, nobody enjoys high salary and good benefits; yet their work intensity is strong and working conditions are poor. This is common, not only for the manufacturers of Apple! Think first how to change the miserable status quo of a giant manufacturing country! —Quasi-Economist

There are many others, collected by the New York Times. Their responses were not all finely aware or richly responsible, and possibly some of them were working for China’s infamous “Fifty Cent Party,” (a state corps of internet propagandists) but certainly less was lost on them than seems to have been lost on us.

Finally, it seems worth noting that the facts, such as we have them, mostly come from Apple’s own Supplier Responsibility Reports. Watch that space. Daisey’s story and the resultant outrage may well have forced Apple to join the Fair Labor Association and reveal the identities of its suppliers.

Just because his story wasn’t true doesn’t mean it didn’t make a difference: this is largely the reason that police officers lie, right?

• Some significant portion of professional philosophers can be manipulated into accepting or refusing the Doctrine of Double Effect on the basis of the order of presentation of moral hypotheticals.

• After-birth abortion: Why should the baby live?

• Catarina Dutilh Novaes aggregates some links on Sarah Hrdy on infanticide

What was no joke were the clashes between police and the hardline protesters.[...] Time and again, on the grounds of confronting the rioters, police made incursions into large masses of peaceful protesters. [...]I can tell you from repeated experience, it feels like a process of collective punishment of a peaceful majority.

I think this week caught Greece on the proverbial brink of something. The anger could easily solidify into anti-German sentiment, but with the conservatives and Orthodox right implicated in the first bailout, anger can more easily flow to the left.

[...]in the three hours I spent at or close to the front of the rioting on Sunday night, I did not see a single other television crew. Ours was repeatedly harassed, verbally and physically, most harshly by a small group of right wingers who accused us of being German.

The article details the effects of austerity on public services combined with widespread tax and fee defiance. Higher taxes and fewer public goods will create a spiraling legitimacy crisis, all while European leaders demand that Greece postpone elections. That means less democracy and accountability to the Greek people when they need it most. It seems untenable, and indeed even Jürgen Habermas has tempered his Euro-optimism with this:

“Sometime after 2008, I understood that the process of expansion, integration and democratization doesn’t automatically move forward of its own accord, that it’s reversible, that for the first time in the history of the EU, we are actually experiencing a dismantling of democracy. I didn’t think this was possible. We’ve reached a crossroads.”

The right answer seems obvious: default on the loans. Even the Financial Times proclaims it: “Greece must default if it wants democracy.” But there are problems. For one thing, Greece isn’t just in debt from past expenditures: it’s currently spending more than it takes in taxes. So a default isn’t the end of its troubles: it’ll still have to make costly cuts and increase taxation. Debt forgiveness won’t be enough: the Greeks would immediately need to go back to borrowing, only now the rates would be even higher since they will have signaled that loans should be treated more like gifts.

That means that the Greek government will not be able to avoid austerity through default and inflation. So what’s left?

• Institute technocratic rule and massive austerity enforced by the IMF and the Eurozone

• Leave the Eurozone and allow the new drachma to inflate faster than the European Central Bank is doing

This is the Communist Party’s answer. But it faces many of the same problems of a simple default, only now exacerbated by capital flight. Leaving the Eurozone will dissipate the wealth that Greece must tax: the wealthy have been waging a quiet run on Greek banks and the behavior has spread to the working-class. They’ll likely disseminate the cash to non-Greek banks in the form of Euros, to avoid the devaluation of a new drachma. This may well be their best hope, and if Greeks vote for it, we should support their efforts to go it alone. But I don’t think they’ll enjoy the same post-default bump that Argentina got, and this actually seems like the course of action with the greatest number of possible unintended consequences. The Communists could easily end up destroying the Greek public sector in order to save it.

• Institute a federal fiscal union with regular interstate tax/spending transfers

Right now, there’s little financial incentive for Germany and France to continue to subsidize Greek debt, and there’s little financial incentive for Greece to remain in the Eurozone. True, German and French banks are massively exposed to the possibilities of default, and this may well preserve the union for a while; but more than a financial bailout or an economic stimulus to jumpstart their economies, I believe the whole EU needs the political stimulus that only closer federation can supply.

Where the financial incentives fail, Habermas and other Euro-optimists have always suggested that cultural commitment to the ideal of European Unity would have to suffice. The way to cement this is to create meaningful democracy at the EU level, along with the mechanisms for regular taxation and spending decisions to be made throughout the entire Union.

Currency union without political unification has always been dangerous, yet it’s common to resist a political union because sharing governance gives people outside of our communities a legal claim on our resources and rights. Still, there’s plenty of evidence that this interstate transfer is what makes the United States function. Much as we in the US hate Congress, especially the way that politicians representing values we don’t share can still govern us… we can’t be federalists without them. And as a bonus, the perpetual transfers lead to better infrastructure investments in currently low-productivity states that allow those states to remain productive rather than suffering from adverse selection.

“More Democracy!” Yes, that’s my final answer.

• Mark Lance, Daniel Levine, and I will be running a free course at the Baltimore Free School on Freedom.
• Daniel Levine has been doing some pretty kick-ass work publishing the lectures from his Moral Dimensions of Public Policy course here.
• Megan McArdle envisions a post-campus America. Sounds devastating, but where is she wrong?
• In a recent post, Peter Levine points us to the work of Lisa Bingham, who has argued for a Collaborative Governance Act to involve more citizens in regulatory rule-making. This mostly involves dismantling public hearing rules, and I’m skeptical, but I like the underlying theory:

the idea is that we govern by shaping our common world. Law is one instrument for that, but law is not sharply different from norms and incentives. Law isn’t merely executed by government; without broad and active popular support, it becomes a dead letter. Besides, government is not unitary. It comes in layers and separate offices and agencies. No part of government monopolizes any kind of power. In the end, government is a bunch of people, and they are not sharply distinguishable from other people.

• Disqus shares data indicating that pseudonyms outperform both anonymous and real name commenters:

According to the data, 61 percent of all Disqus comments are made via pseudonyms, versus 35 percent anonymous and 4 percent using real names (i.e. Facebook). People with pseudonyms also comment 6.5 times more than those who comment anonymously and 4.7 times more than commenters who use real names… Disqus maintains that not only does allowing pseudonyms produce more comments, but the quality of the comments is also better, as measured by likes and replies.

• I’ve hatched a plan to work through some of the classical political theory of the middle class, because some of the entailments in this post are troubling me and I’m not sure if I’m ready to give up on the middle class just yet. I’m thinking of doing posts on Aristotle, Montesquieu, Marx, and Stephen Elkin. Any requests?
• I’ve also working on a paper on the fungibility of money and the difficulties this creates for the attribution of agency. It’s mushrooming out of control as I realize how many differing examples there are:

1. Susan G. Komen and Planned Parenthood
2. Health insurance plans and contraceptive
3. Apple products and Chinese labor conditions
4. Boycotting companies because of the politics of their CEO or campaign contributions
5. Taxes and War, Welfare, Social Policy, etc.
6. Ethical consumption and buy local campaigns v. marketing an ethical life and greenwashing

Thoughts? Consider this an open thread.

Education is the number one life regret, accounting for 32.2% of all reported regrets (SD = 1.89). This is a strikingly consistent finding, confirmed by a wide margin in all but two data sets (those exceptions being Landman et al., 1995, and Data Set 3 ofLandman & Manis, 1992).

Educational regrets were things like “should have stayed in school, should have studied harder, should have gotten another degree.” In other words, people wish they’d worked harder. After education, people regret their careers, romance, parenting, self, and leisure. In contrast, few people have regrets related to finance, family, health, friends, spirituality, or community: “the remaining six regrets were so low in frequency as to be effectively inconsequential.”

In short, we probably shouldn’t ignore Ware’s advice, all we need to do is reverse it:

1. Conform to expectations.
2. Work and study harder.
3. Bottle up your feelings.
4. Don’t stay in touch with old friends.
5. Don’t worry so much about happiness.

dgaicun comments:

One hypocrisy to always keep in mind about social class, is that people earn social status brownie points by A) earning lots of money and moving up in high status jobs, and B) simultaneously paying lots of lip service to the idea that money and good jobs are superficial and don’t matter much. People do this all the time; watch for it.

Sounds a lot like the satisficers from my post on the middle class. The study’s authors draw this conclusion:

Opportunity breeds regret, and so regret lingers where opportunity existed. Rankings of life regrets, interesting in and of themselves, point to this deeper theoretical principle. Life regrets are a reflection of where in life people see opportunity, that is, where they see the most tangible prospects for change, growth, and renewal.

In other words: regrets are a luxury, not a truth-tracking emotion. Enjoy them as the mixture of nostalgia and tenderness that they are, but don’t succumb to the fantasy that they necessarily track better choices.