Positive Liberty

Just lately there have been major gay rights victories in Canada and California.

We eagerly await a rain of sulfur from the heavens. Meanwhile, everyone who wants to be kind to the most high-profile same-sex married couple they know assures Scott and I that same-sex marriage is inevitable.

For my own sanity, and so that I don’t bite your head off, please stop.

Nothing in culture, or even in politics, is ever inevitable. I know that you mean well by saying what you do, and that by saying these things you would place same-sex marriage right next to interracial marriage and racial equality more generally. Don’t. It’s a mistake to think either one was , or is, inevitable.

Like you, I’m convinced that both are transcendently just. I dare say I’m betting more on this particular idea than most of you; I’ll look foolish indeed if, in twenty years, everyone else has rejected same-sex marriage. He got married to a man? How quaint…

It’s coming up on two years since Scott and I got married; we did so shortly after Ontario changed its laws, making us one of the first same-sex married couples in the entire United States. We’re still in the fight; we’re still convinced we’re wearing the white hats here. But it would be absurd to allow any complacency.

Do civil rights movements really fail? Absolutely. Consider the Equal Rights Amendment, the stalled movement to compensate blacks for slavery, and the cause of animal rights, which has made only limited progress during its long existence.

…but Jason, those things are wrong. Gay marriage is right.

Oh? How convenient it is, how convenient, that everything we now have is right, that all the causes that failed just happened to be wrong, and that there’s just this one that we’re still working on, which is surely going to happen any day now. No. It’s too perfect a story, too comforting. Worse, it’s quite arguably untrue.

Consider that same-sex marriage wasn’t even an inevitable outcome of the gay rights movement, as this excellent essay by Greg James Robinson argues. And I have also written much the same.

Consider further that support for same-sex marriage in the United States is stagnant or falling. Apparently we are even failing to win over the next generation, which, according to the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy, is now trending against support for same-sex marriage (PDF here).

Yes, I know, IMAPP also publishes blather like this:

The Close Relationship Model [of marriage] radically sidelines the main feature that makes marriage unique and important as a social institution–that is, the attempt to bridge sex difference and struggle with the generative power of opposite-sex unions, including the reality that children often arise (intentionally and not) from heterosexual unions…

…A “close relationships” culture fails to acknowledge fundamental facts of human life: the fact of sexual difference; the enormous tide of heterosexual desire in human life; the procreativity of male-female bonding; the unique social ecology of parenting which offers children bonds with their biological parents; and the rich genealogical nature of family ties and the web of intergenerational supports for family members that they provide.

As if close relationships would not almost always be heterosexual.

As if these close relationships would not bridge sex differences (would distant, authoritarian relationships do better?).

As if these close relationships would not do something about the “enormous tide” of heterosexual desire.

As if the parents of children may be cold and aloof from one another–provided only that they are heterosexual.

As if the slightest concession to a tiny minority would “radically sideline” the majority.

And as if gay and lesbian relationships do not provide intergenerational supports for family members.

Please. To you and me, this is most likely absurd. I would love to introduce Maggie Gallagher to my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, my cousins and brothers–by marriage. I have more family bonds right now than at any time in my life, and I owe most of them to same-sex marriage.

But guess what–America loves just this sort of absurdity. And it’s high time we start coming up with a more positive message of our own, a message rooted, like IMAPP’s, in family, continuity, and stability.

For now, each election cycle brings more and more states to amend their constitutions to deny not only same-sex marriage, but also all other protections for same-sex relationships. What the straight world is saying to us–clumsily, through the awful medium of the government–is that we may do whatever we wish in bed, provided only that we never take responsibility for one another, that we never seek stability, that we do not aspire to permanence. Our quest for permanence has somehow come to seem a threat to them, as though permanence were a scarce resource to squabble over. It is no such thing, and we need to make this clear. I only wish I knew how.

The Boston Gay Men’s Chorus is a 175+ member men’s vocal group that has performed in the past with the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, DC. Both Scott and I are members of the latter.

Apparently the men from Boston met both cheers and jeers while touring in Wroclaw, Poland. The story is all very preliminary, though, and I will post more details as they arrive:

Steve Smith [of BGMC] writing from Wroclaw Poland here. Our concert last night caused major controversy. Given that I have limited time and resources here to have internet access, I cannot put together a formal press release, but please feel free to use this first hand report. We are in all the newspapers here in Poland this morning and were on most television news as well. FYI, we leave Poland early this morning for a 7 hour bus trip to Prague. I expect to next have internet access on Wed. morning, Prague time.

Our concert in Wroclaw was protested by an extreme right wing group called the League of Polish Families. All of the locals here said that they are a reactionary group tacitly funded and supported by conservative elements within the Catholic Church here.

Attention to our concert - the first openly gay chorus concert in this country - was heightened after protests and violence in Warsaw last week when the Mayor cancelled a gay pride rally.

The day before our concert, the local organizer named Jaroslav Blandzinski, was arrested for handing out concert flyers at the opera house. Mr. Blandzinki is the owner of the only gay club in the city and took organizing the concert as a personal challenge. He was later released, but no reason was given for his arrest.

The local director of Filharmonic Hall, our concert venue, has been under public attack to cancel the concert for a week, but she held fast and did not do so despite municipal pressure.

On Monday morning, the League of Polish Families stated that they would purchase all remaining concert tickets in order to occupy the concert and force cancellation of the concert. At that time, the concert hall suspended all ticket sales and would only honor tickets bought in advance (however, ticket sales resumed at the door just before the concert in person. Advance sales had been 200, but more than 450 were eventually sold… almost hall capacity of 500).

Also the League issued a release that they would form a human chain around the hall to prohibit the Chorus from entering and “defiling” the hall. After police intervention, they were not allowed to do this.

At this point, early in the day, we noticed an substantial police presence at our hotel, with 2 large blue police vans filled with 4 armed police at each entrance. Chorus members were advised to stay in the hotel. Although the concert hall was only 4 blocks away, we were required to be transported to the concert in busses that received police escort.

At the hall, I saw more than 25 armed policemen forming a secure path to the concert hall from the street. 5 more vans with obvious riot gear were parked next to the hall.

Worried? Don’t be. Here’s my favorite part.

There were about 20 total protesters. They had enormous signs and banners with crude sexually explicit anti gay cartoons and black flags with their logo. They shouted we were pedophiles and diseased. An unexpected counter demonstration formed on the other side of the courtyard made up of (I am told) gay rights activists and anarchists. There was about an hour of continuous shouting matches as the chorus and then audience members entered. There was also a crowd of more than 200 watching. I am not aware of any physical violence against the chorus or attendees.

TV crews and reporters from Wroclaw, Warsaw, Katowice, Poznan and other cities were in abundance. Reuben Reynolds and I did more than 30 interviews thru the day and film crews recorded our rehearsal and concert.

Reaction to the concert from the audience was astonishing. The ovations lasted nearly 10 minutes and the chorus had to reenter the stage twice for bows after the concert. Literally hundreds of people were visibly in tears.

Numerous local political officials including the Mayor and the wife of Poland’s president did not attend. A proclamation from Mayor Menino for the event was read to the crowd and then given to the local organizer, Jaroslav Blandzinski, in lieu of any officials…

Steve Smith, Executive Director, BGMC

It’s amazing what damage a handful of people and a little moral panic can do. But it’s also amazing to see how, with courage, what’s right can still win out in the end. Thanks, Boston. You guys just made my day.

Update: Via Dave Jansing, here are two more links on the chorus tour, one from the Boston Herald, the other from Polskie Radio External Service.

Update II: Dave Jansing, my one-man research department, informs me that BGMC also has a tour blog. Here’s a favorite quote:

We still don’t have a lot of details. It seems that a right-wing party (sound familiar?) made up of ultra-conservative Catholics and some other radical elements have threatened to protest. We’ve been warned that we may get egged and that they may try to disrupt or shout down the concert. I hope it’s all talk, but we’re prepared to meet them peacefully and
with dignity if it happens. We’ve been told by the tour company not to wear our Chorus shirts or other identifying items, and we’re going to take the buses everywhere with us just in case.

Evidently, the director of the concert hall was asked to kick us out but she refused. When she rented the hall to the tour company, she said, “All I need to know is: Do they sing well?” That’s all we ask: Let us sing, listen to our voices, and decide for yourself.

Thanks again, guys. You’re awesome.

Now, we get claims all the time–as far as difficult claims go–from people asking, can we prove that God doesn’t exist? Ah, but they have the wrong picture, you see? I don’t say that any of these [supernatural] powers, including God, doesn’t exist; I make no claim. I ask them to make the claim, and they have to prove that they’re right. So they say, okay, “God exists.” I say, “Prove it.” “Ah, um, I’ll call you back.” “Hello?” And we never hear from them again.

– James Randi, paranormal investigator, in the current issue of the Skeptical Inquirer

A friend of mine, a Christian whom I greatly respect, e-mailed me about the Carnival of the Godless, wherein I invited the faithful to sit on chairs that they had never seen. I understand, I joked, that it’s more blessed that way. He replied,

Think for a moment about the Big Bang. For centuries, humankind believed in a static, eternal universe (and at part of that history, we even believed that everything revolved around our own planet; a truly ego-centrical point of view). And yes, they believed this without evidence. But there were others who also believed in another view: that the universe was expanding and the expansion must have been caused by a massive explosion outwards. They had no evidence of this explosion, they only had evidence of the expansion. (See Singh’s, “Big Bang: The Origins Of The Universe”.)

But scientists believed in the Big Bang Theory anyway. Was it misguided? In the end, no, although so many people told them not to look at the chair because it’s more blessed that way.

Yes, there are those of us who believe in blessings. No, we don’t have any evidence. But no one seems to have evidence to the negative, either. So, I, for one, will keep on looking. And like the Belgian Jesuit priest Georges Lemaitre, I will continue to believe while I seek evidence.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get ready to sit in the blessed chair. And I will choose to look.

It raises huge questions, and I thought I’d offer a reply. I’m making it public in case anyone else was put off by my wisecrack.

First, a quibble: The naive, earth-centered view of the cosmos actually did have some evidence going for it. To wit, the stars and planets all seemed to move, as did the sun and the moon. By contrast, human beings felt no sense of motion while sitting still on earth. These are slight bits of evidence, and they are certainly misleading, but they are evidence of a sort.

When heliocentrism replaced geocentrism as a description of the cosmos, it was the product of better evidence, much of which contradicted the earlier view. Observers and theorists worked out a model that seemed to explain the world around them better, and a scientific revolution was born. (A naive error, to which my friend does not subscribe, is to conclude that because science sometimes changes its mind, it must therefore be wrong in principle. He’s far too smart for this one, though, and I hope that you are too. But many creationists do fall for it.)

A similar revolution took place with the advent of the Big Bang theory, holding that the observed expansion of the universe is best explained by an initial state wherein the entire universe was contained in a tiny… something. And here is where our explanations break down, where the theorists disagree among themselves, and where scant reliable evidence exists.

The question, then, is this: Is belief in the Christian God analogous to belief in the Big Bang?

I would say no, and for three reasons.

First, Christian scripture instructs us not to put Him to the test, but to continue believing even if we have not seen. Now, to some this may be a thoroughly convincing argument; to others, it may be a mystery, albeit one they dare not question. But for a third group, the whole business of belief without evidence seems uncomfortably like cheating. Regrettably, I’m in the last of these three groups. A theory that includes the injunction to believe without evidence should be suspect from the getgo.

Second, if we admit that there is some evidence for Christianity–and I think that there is, at least for its more mundane aspects–still, we have to ask just what conclusions are justified from that evidence. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, and, if anything, the Christian faith is much more extraordinary than even the Big Bang: The latter is an extrapolation backwards from events we observe all around us; the former introduces a great many new concepts for which scripture and tradition are the only authorities. These include Heaven, Hell, the Trinity, Original Sin, and the Incarnation. It’s too much, based on far too little.

Where the Big Bang offers one idea that may be tested through further research, Christianity offers an abundance of ideas for which empirical tests are impossible and/or strongly discouraged. Could you even design an experiment that would prove the reality of the Trinity? Or that would pinpoint the source of human wickedness in the fault of a single pair of ancestors? Could you devise a method for testing the existence of Heaven–or Hell–reliably, and then teach your method to a neutral or even a hostile observer?

Third, if scientists found evidence pointing consistently toward some better explanation than the Big Bang, they would eventually abandon that theory in favor of a new one. So far as I can tell, for a Christian to apply this standard would be a violation of the First Commandment: If we believe while continuing honestly to look for more evidence, then we must face the reality that our evidence may lead us elsewhere–perhaps to another religion, or perhaps to no religion at all. I do not find this admission in most forms of Christianity; instead, I find its opposite.

I do hope not to offend anyone with this post. I know religion is among the touchiest subjects I could possibly discuss. Still, while I respect the faiths of others, I just can’t see putting religious faith in the same box as scientific theory. No matter whether one, or the other, or both are correct–they just don’t seem to go together. This is why the joke about the chair is funny at all: It juxtaposes two things that have no business being together, and it asks us to re-examine the assumptions we make about things like truth, belief, and evidence.

Incidentally, I should mention that I also know another Christian, one who once claimed to have direct evidence of the Resurrection. A proof that someone had risen from the dead would require some extraordinary evidence, and it would set some (but certainly not all) of the Christian faith on a more solidly scientific footing. After that, he would still have dozens more mysteries to explain.

In the end, I did not ask him for the evidence, and I don’t plan to. I didn’t want to start a needless argument, and I hope I’m not starting one here, either. I really do want to keep my Christian friends.

Via Stalinist Orange…

…’nuff said.

Or rather… That could be the headline. Radley Balko, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute, writes,

You know, the next time some thick-headed liberal spouts off about how I or my employer, the Cato Institute, shouldn’t be taken seriously because we’re “funded by corporations,” (a vacant charge, but that’s beside the point) I think I’ll point to Kelo.

It is the “corporate-funded” libertarian organizations like Cato (who filed an amicus brief in the case) and the Institute for Justice (who represented the plaintiffs) who sided with the low and middle-income home owners over the land-grabbing corporations, here (not to mention the elderly who, because they tend to value the sentiment attached to their homes — where they raised their kids, for example — over the money they might get for them, tend to be disproportionately affected by eminent domain).

It is the Elite Left who sold those people out in favor of big government.

It’s easy to favor eminent domain when you have a solid upper-middle-class income, great geographic mobility, and/or a property that’s unlikely to be seized for “renewal.” Viewed at arm’s length, with personal sacrifices both few and unlikely to be made, of course urban renewal sounds like a good thing. The greatest good for the greatest number, no?

Yet our government was not founded on any such utilitarianism. Indeed, it was founded on quite the opposite principle: There are some things that, no matter how advantageous, a government may not do. Not even if they result–but by whose reckoning? Pfizer’s?–in a greater good.

Economic wealth is not the be-all and end-all of a free society. It may be a consequence, in general, if we do everything right. But you and I do not exist to maximize revenue for the government–which, so far as I can tell, is the principle that Kelo enshrines. No, we don’t even exist to maximize revenue for ourselves.

We exist for a plethora of reasons, some economic, some otherwise. So far as it is legitimate, the government exists to keep us out of one another’s way as we pursue these goals. Government’s purpose is not to make sure that everyone has a nice house, in a nice neighborhood, with a shiny new corporate office park close at hand. It’s to get out of the way–and allow us to decide for ourselves.

Welcome to all atheists, skeptics, agnostics, infidels, and doubters of various sorts. I am your host, Jason Kuznicki, and this is the Sixteenth Carnival of the Godless.

Welcome also to those who still believe in things without evidence. We have a chair for you right here–just don’t look at it before you sit down. I understand it’s more blessed that way.

And now, without further ado…

Let’s start with a moral panic, just to get everyone’s attention. John B at The Sharpener writes,

The UK government may soon face a terrible clash of Silly New Laws: not only has it vowed to protect witches from discrimination, it has also vowed to clamp down on witches. The Wiccans are apparently following in the footsteps of their historical predecessors in seeking to slaughter children, although gingerbread houses appear not to be involved this time round.

This clash should be fairly easy to resolve in reality: we’ll come to some kind of compromise. The government will issue empty statements and impose scary new laws as part of its War On Baby Eating, which will make a large proportion of the Wiccan community believe that we fear them and want to burn them at the stake. However, to make sure they don’t lose the Wiccan vote, the government will also issue empty statements that most witches are perfectly OK, and impose scary new laws that make it illegal for anyone to suggest that witches eat babies.

At some point, burning them at the stake may become the better option. Read the whole thing: “Witches, Witch Hunters, and the Blood Libel.”

And Now For a Conspiracy: It’s vast, it’s right-wing, and it’s closer than you imagine. Peter Fredson has the details.

Aliens Among Us: PZ Myers has a confession to make. He’s actually an alien who hails from “The Planet of the Hats.” You know, I didn’t think “PZ” was a human name either. Here’s what it’s like back on his home planet:

My people are obsessed with hats. Almost everyone wears them, and a lot of their identity is wrapped up in their particular style. Some people always wear cowboy hats, for instance, and others wear bowlers, and each think the other is exceedingly funny-looking, and would never consider switching. They have elaborate ceremonies for their children in which they confer the hats, and kids often go to special schools once a week where they learn about the history and significance of their hats. Everyone has the importance of hats drilled into them from birth to death.

Unconversion Narrative: It’s a fine old religious tradition for the born again believer to write down exactly what the moment of conversion was like. Of course, nothing prevents an atheist from doing the same–and here, Steve Pavlina does it to marvelous effect. Bonus: doing calculus in crayon.

Egoism, Anyone? Richard Chappell of Philosophy, Et Cetera argues that even if God created us for a purpose, that purpose need not be our own.

Science vs Religion, Part I: Bora Zivkovic gives a number of thoughts on history, science and faith in a wide-ranging essay titled “If Only People Read Their Bible the Way They Read Their Contracts.” It’s a grab-bag of many different ideas, but here was my favorite part:

Science is doing exactly what early smart theologians understood so well - slowly exterminating religion by exposing its factual errors and making it irrelevant.

So, did they get smart and adopt the theological/philosophical defense of religion? Oh, no. They are pretending that their religion is scientific. They adopted the terminology and the style of argument of science and they are selling their wares to the uneducated. The uneducated are incapable of discerning what is true what is not. But they are magnetically drawn to arguments that SEEM to be scientific.

Science vs Religion, Part II: Or, Creationists Do the Damnedest Things:

Larry Booher, the Roanoke, Virginia high school biology teacher who has been secretly teaching creationism to his students for 15 years using his own homemade 500-page textbook, thought it was okay to break the law because no one was complaining.

I’m amazed that he could even write 500 pages on creationism. It’s all of, what, three pages in Genesis? Even more shocking is how long he got away with it. Brent Rasmussen, founder of the Carnival, has the details.

Science vs Religion, Part III: Finally, there’s my contribution. I take Intelligent Design advocate William Dembski to task for misunderstanding what “skepticism” means. And, almost despite myself, I suggest why evolution isn’t such a threat to religion after all. The post is called “Taking Dembski’s Advice.”

Sequels: That’s it for this Carnival of the Godless. (If anything is missing, just let me know and I’ll make sure it’s added.) The next Carnival will be on July 10, 2005 at Tobias Bucknell Online.

The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled 5-4 in Kelo v New London, that the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment permits state governments to redistribute private property with the aim of maximizing tax revenue. In this case, a handful of homeowners will be evicted against their will to make room for a pharmaceutical plant. Liberals take note: If you really support the common man against big corporations, then you too should be outraged by this case.

While the decision reaffirms a position that has been the status quo for quite some time, still I am puzzled. The Takings Clause reads,

Private property shall not be taken for a public use, without just compensation.

That’s a full stop at the end, with not a word about tax revenue.

As Randy Barnett has argued in Restoring the Lost Constitution, we are certainly not to interpret the adjective “public” here to imply that government takings for private use are ever permitted–with or without just compensation. Such a power was never contemplated at the adoption of the Constitution, except to regard it with horror: The power itself implies strongly that private landowners hold their land only by virtue of a “public” utility, and, ultimately, that the property does not truly belong to them. In the final analysis, all property would then belong to the government.

As a thought experiment, consider the following: Under the present interpretation of the Takings Clause, what forms of government taking are not legitimate? Provided that “just compensation” is given, it seems there is nothing at all preventing any sort of taking, so long as some legislature votes to do it. Let’s also not forget that just compensation is largely in the eye of the beholder. Its very existence in the Constitution is something of a necessary evil: If the compensation truly were just, then governmental “takings” would not exist at all. Instead, the government would simply raise its offer enough to induce the property owners to sell of their own accord.

At least the Court’s conservatives put up a good show in the defense of private property. One day the view expressed in their dissent may yet prevail again, as it has for most of our nation’s history. Justice O’Connor did particularly well to cite the following:

An act of the Legislature (for I cannot call it a law) contrary to the great first principles of the social compact, cannot be considered a rightful exercise of legislative authority… A few instances will suffice to explain what I mean… [A] law that takes property from A. and gives it to B: It is against all reason and justice, for a people to entrust a Legislature with such powers; and, therefore, it cannot be presumed that they have done it.” Calder v. Bull, 3 Dall. 386, 388 (1798)

I used to think that that was what the United States was all about. Now I learn that we’re really one giant revenue farm for the government.

Others discussing the case include Jonathan Bunch, Ed Brayton, Radley Balko, and an active discussion at SCOTUSblog, where the consensus view expresses surprise that Kelo’s position mustered even the four votes it received. (To tout my own court-watching abilities, I’d like to note that at the time of the oral arguments, I zeroed in on Justice O’Connor making exactly the point she later produced in the dissent. Many others had thought she would have sided with the government.)

I suppose I will be interested in discussing this, eventually. But first someone just explain to me how our government remains one of limited powers in light of Raich, Kelo, and the indefinite detentions of those who are neither accused of crimes nor are POWs. From where I sit, the circle has finally closed: The enemies of liberty on the left and the right have all come to an agreement in which big government wins no matter what the rationale or the venue. I only hope we will realize what is happening before even more damage is done.

Update: Jim Henley says much the same. It must be something in the Maryland water:

Among Kelo, Raich, the President’s assertion of his ability to strip the citizenship from any American and declare that person an enemy combatant, the institution of torture as an official if lightly denied policy, all of it stretching back to Wickard v. Filburn, we have completed our revolution-within-the-form. We are now, in principle, a totalitarian country, merely one where Authority is required to undertake certain showy gyrations for the entertainment of the crowd while pursuing its glorious visions. Perhaps we and they will continue to find the gyrations so entertaining that we’ll keep them in place. Even fascism must express itself through a local cultural matrix.

Over at Liberty & Power, Jonathan Dresner comments on my post “Torture, Evidence, and the Rule of Law:”

It’s kind of sad, but my World History Since 1500 students recently read Cesare Beccaria’s 1764 argument on torture, which is almost identical to your own:

No man can be judged a criminal until he be found guilty; nor can society take from him the public protection until it has been proved that he has violated the conditions on which it was granted. What right, then, but that of power, can authorize the punishment of a citizen so long as there remains any doubt of his guilt? This dilemma is frequent. Either he is guilty, or not guilty. If guilty, he should only suffer the punishment ordained by the laws, and torture becomes useless, as his confession is unnecessary. If he be innocent his crime has not been proved. Besides, it is confounding all relations to expect a man should be both the accuser and accused; and that pain should be the test of truth, as if truth resided in the muscles and fibres of a wretch in torture. By this method the robust will escape, and the feeble be condemned. [On Crimes and Punishments, trans. Paolucci, p. 67]

Yes indeed. I’d actually had Beccaria in the back of my mind when I wrote the piece, but I couldn’t find the citation. Thanks!

Meanwhile, Caleb McDaniel has some excellent arguments about torture and the Nazi analogy, suggesting that we don’t have to go nearly so far afield: The United States has behaved brutally enough to supply all the analogies we need. He writes,

If we cannot ask of our policies whether they are better than the practices of the gulag, let us ask of them: are they better than the practices of our great-great-grandparents, our great-grandparents, our grandparents, our parents? Will we be proud to report this policy to future generations? Or is that question, too, un-American?

I can hear the wingnuts already: Caleb, why do you hate America?

Lastly, Andrew Sullivan gets an excellent e-mail:

All those “ticking bomb scenarios” assume a) that you’ve got the right guy and b) that he’s not just telling you what you want to hear until the bomb goes off. So, knowing that torture doesn’t work, a liberal pragmatist tries to find out what does: language skills, a detailed knowledge of individual weaknesses, the painstaking study of political conditions, strong alliances and cooperation among security forces, the cultivation of international moral prestige, and even the humane treatment of prisoners. The chauvinist rejects this pragmatism as a lack of moral clarity. But which approach defends us better?

These guys remind me of the people in the late forties and early fifties who thought that liberalism would never be able to remain true to itself and still defeat the USSR. Even on the economy, there were plenty of respectable forecasts showing the USSR passing the West in per capita income. They posed as the West’s staunchest defenders, yet at bottom they’d lost confidence in it. They didn’t believe Hayek when he concluded that central planning gives you not only serfdom, but economic decline. But they were wrong, and containment worked. That’s why it’s so important to fight this battle. Hayek in the realm of ideas is a marketplace of free, sincere criticism. The torture-defenders are already showing us the alternative: a descent into ineffective mendacity and, when the failure and lying become obvious, desperate chauvinism.

I’ll have more of my own thoughts about this topic soon, but for now I need to get to work.

Ed Brayton of Dispatches from the Culture Wars writes,

If coercive and abusive interrogation techniques are being used on someone who can genuinely be called a terrorist, someone who would fly a plane into a building full of innocent people or engage in suicide bombing, I have trouble working up much sympathy over it and I suspect most other people can’t feel any at all. If those techniques used on such people are effective in getting information that may prevent such attacks, who could reasonably oppose them? But I have no way of knowing if they are effective in doing so, and neither does anyone else here.

But I’ll say this - they better be worth it. If we are not getting specific and credible information that is genuinely and directly helping prevent further attacks, then it is not worth the damage we are doing to our international standing and our ability to occupy the moral high ground. I understand that this is a catch-22 for the government to some extent - if they don’t prevent attacks, they get criticized and if they act aggressively to prevent them, they get criticized. But I’m also concerned, as [Andrew] Sullivan is, about the migration of techniques whereby interrogation tactics that should be reserved only for those with real operational knowledge to be extracted are used against low-level, run of the mill detainees who don’t know a thing.

Because Ed is one of my closest blogfriends, I trust that he will not mind if I take him to task.

My problems begin with the first sentence of these quoted paragraphs: If coercive and abusive interrogation techniques are being used on someone who can genuinely be called a terrorist… [then] I have trouble working up much sympathy.

In reply I have a simple question: How exactly does the American system of justice determine guilt or innocence?

Americans judge guilt and innocence in an open court of law, following well-established procedures based on tradition and statute. Before anyone “can be called a terrorist,” with all the legal penalties thereof, they must first pass through this system–and be found guilty. Until then, the law and its agents must treat them as though they were innocent. Nor is this treatment negotiable. It’s precisely what we are (supposedly) fighting for.

Now if indeed we are abusing terrorists, then at least conceivably their crimes might merit corporal punishment. Yet these individuals have not been convicted, they have not even been tried, and, at least to my knowledge, there is no legal authorization for the punishments they have received, which sometimes include being beaten to death. I may have trouble working up sympathy for terrorists, but I have great sympathy for the rule of law–and I fear that this, too, is being beaten to death.

Now these may seem like petty, legalistic arguments, and I’d freely concede that in some sense they are. But there is another reason, far graver and more practical than these, why the United States has no business torturing detainees: Torture doesn’t work.

It may be utterly satisfying to beat someone when we ourselves have been hurt. Heck, I won’t lie to you here: It is satisfying. It feels wonderful. And deep down, this is exactly why people torture.

But let’s take a step back from the abyss here, and consider the victims of torture. Guilty or innocent–it hardly matters–these victims eventually learn that the beatings will stop when the torturer is happy again. Now the surest way to make a torturer smile is to gratify his delusions, to give him the sense that his work has been efficacious, and to convince him that he has, through torture, defeated the plots of his enemies.

In short, the torturer happiest of all when he hears the story that he already wants to hear. Torture produces little or no useful information. Mostly it produces fantasies that are negotiated at the crack of a whip.

I don’t need to tell you, Ed, that historically, torture produced the appalling show trials of Stalin and Mao, in which ordinary citizens confessed to the most absurd delusions of their captors: Russian factory hands admitted to being Lithuanian saboteurs; lifelong communists avowed that they had secret loyalties to the czar; Chinese peasants even confessed to being capitalists. And with that, the beatings stopped.

Back in my own era of expertise, torture also produced the witchcraft trials of the early modern period, in which women–and sometimes men–learned that they could go free if only they confessed to flying through the air at night and worshipping the devil. Yes, a confession quite often meant freedom, but it also perpetuated the system whereby those who refused to confess were burned at the stake. In no case did it produce any meaningful knowledge.

To the degree that we have approached these horrors, the United States has done wrong. We are not yet a Stalinist regime, but the gap between us and them has narrowed unacceptably. It’s time to hold ourselves to a higher standard–if, that is, it’s not too late.

All Politics Is Local: Mobtown Blues, a Baltimore politics blog, reports on Mayor Martin O’Malley’s appearance at the Baltimore Pride Festival:

Let me say that being seen at Pride is not an uncommon thing for hizzoner. He’s done a good job on the whole of reaching out to the LGBT community during his tenure as Baltimore executive, particularly for a guy who ran as an anti-abortion conservative Democrat when he was campaigning for City Council in Northeast all those years back. No, what marked this year’s mayoral appearance as an exercise in gubernatorial vote-grubbing was what he was wearing: snug, fitted blue jeans and an expensive, skintight white t-shirt made of that fabric that wicks the moisture away. Oh, and a small, blue HRC sticker affixed tastefully on one of his bulging pecs.

Now, if you were running for statewide office, you wanted to court the affluent gay vote in Baltimore, and you had the biceps and abs to pull off such an outfit, wouldn’t you bring out every gun (so to speak) in your campaign arsenal? I swear, people were, like, doing the wave when he walked by. What a pol.

Yes indeed, if there were a contest for “hottest mayor,” Baltimore would be a strong contender. I’d say something about how Mencken called democracy the most amusing form of government, but I doubt he was thinking of this.

Yet another book meme: Paul Musgrave has tagged me for one more round of intellectual navel-gazing.

1. Number of Books I Own: The standard response to this question seems to be, “Oh, I own thousands and thousands of books, way too many to count.” I hate to be a curmudgeon, but the blogosphere is manifestly not well-read enough to support all of these claims. I own 781 books–I just counted them–and I am not ashamed of it. But rarely has a single meme question exposed so many poseurs at once, and my hat is off to its creator, who is a genius.

2. Last Book I Bought: Science and Religion: Are They Compatible?, a collection of essays edited by Paul Kurtz. It features material by Daniel Dennett, Arthur C. Clarke, Richard Dawkins, Antony Flew, Stephen Jay Gould, and many others, and covers topics ranging from the afterlife to Islamic creationism.

3. Last Book I Read: The same. I devoured it over the weekend and blogged about some of it last night; see below.

4. Books That Mean A Lot To me:

The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
Island by Aldous Huxley
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea by Daniel Dennett
The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse
The Rediscovery of Man, the collected short stories of Cordwainer Smith

5. Tag five people to participate in the meme: Um, no. I think everyone I’d want to ask has either participated already or isn’t actively blogging anymore.

Evisceration: Denis Diderot is often quoted as saying, “Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.” He may not actually have said it, but for those who agree–and also for those inclined toward gentler methods–there is the Carnival of the Godless. I will be hosting the Carnival at Positive Liberty this Sunday morning, and there is still plenty of time for more submissions. Atheists, secularists, skeptics, agnostics, and doubters of all varieties are invited to submit their best recent work. Send your material to cotg-submission@brentrasmussen.com; posting guidelines can be found here.

Volunteers? Via Kip Esquire, I learn that Ex-Gay Watch, a really great blog about the ex-gay movement, is looking for volunteers. Here’s the announcement:

If you have some writing experience, convey messages with a civil and factual tone, and believe you could improve on our content (such as it is), please consider volunteering for Ex-Gay Watch.

Ideal candidates read XGW or similar blogs frequently, support freedom of religion and expression, reject discrimination and censorship as a tool for one’s own political advancement, oppose the religious right, and relate well with both “liberals” and “conservatives.” Gay-tolerant exgays, in particular, are encouraged to apply.

I like what Kip has to say:

I’ve never personally encountered any “ex-gay” or reparative therapy types or their victims. I’ve heard, however, that the torture theater from Clockwork Orange was based on early reparative therapy experiments.

My sense is that the movement is remarkably small for the amount of press it gets. And that it’s only real raison d’etre is to make homosexual orientation seem as though it were a choice, which, to the minds of many, would justify the use of force against it. It’s funny, because I’ve always seen that as the ultimate non sequitur.

…Or Perhaps Just Taking It Apart

Summary: In his contribution to the volume Science and Religion: Are They Compatible?, intelligent design advocate William Dembski suggests that skeptics will find it virtually impossible to defeat the idea that life was designed by something more than mere chance. To do so, he makes a number of troubling claims about the scientific and skeptical establishment–but he also makes at least one very important point that is liable to be missed: Skeptics need to be more sensitive about the troubling consequences of evolution–and to present a more inspiring worldview of their own.

Skepticism and Nihilism. First, let’s examine Dembski’s epistemological account of skepticism. It’s deeply flawed but worth considering for just this reason. Dembski writes,

…on two occasions I offered to join the editorial advisory board of Michael Shermer’s Skeptic Magazine to be its resident skeptic regarding evolution… he never took me up on my offer. Indeed, he can’t afford to…

Skepticism faces a curious tension. On the one hand, to maintain credibility it must be willing to shine the light of scrutiny everywhere, and thus in principle even on evolution. On the other hand, to be the scourge with which to destroy superstition and whip a gullible public into line, it must commit itself to a materialistic conception of science and thus cannot afford to question evolution.

But this is to confuse skepticism with nihilism. Skepticism properly speaking does not uniformly disbelieve everything. On the contrary, it disbelieves theories only so long as positive, testable evidence for them is insufficient. When such evidence appears, however, the skeptic must change his course. He may even–contra Dembski–accept a given idea as true, provided that no significant evidence emerges against the idea.

There is absolutely nothing in the rules of skepticism that forbids sincere belief. Only belief without foundation is forbidden. This, and a not unified dogma, is how skepticism maintains its “scourge.”

I should pause to note that it’s quite different from religion in this respect–and that creationists have often taken mainstream science to task for precisely its supple, adaptive character. Surely, they reason, real truth would never change. Dembski, by contrast, asks why a good skeptic shouldn’t doubt everything in his path, including evolution.

One wonders what positive benefit might accrue to intelligent design if such skeptics were to replace their actual foes, for surely these nihilist-skeptics would doubt Intelligent Design as well. But I digress, and it’s time to move on.

And Science? Dembski’s scientific claims in the article are few, limited to a vague discussion of “specified complexity” and the impossibility of the bacterial flagellum. It’s an argument recapitulated here, running in essence as follows:

the E. coli bacterial flagellum simply could not have evolved gradually over time. The bacterial flagellum is an “irreducibly complex” system. An irreducibly complex system is one composed of multiple parts, all of which are necessary for the system to function. If you remove any one part, the entire system will fail to function. Every individual part is integral. There is absolutely no naturalistic, gradual, evolutionary explanation for the bacterial flagellum. (Michael Behe, Darwin’s Black Box, 1996.)

It puzzles me why ID theorists find this argument so compelling. While a look at present-day biological systems seems to reveal a certain bootstrapping effect–the mousetrap only works if the latch, the spring, the bar, the lever, and so forth all work just so–our present-day perspective neglects the natural history of the mousetrap, or organism, in question, wherein those parts may have been used for locomotion, reproduction, camouflage, or purposes we cannot even imagine. Only later, by slow, intermittently useful degrees, did they fuse into something that looks irreducibly complex. There’s no mystery at all to this, unless one starts out eager to find a mystery in the first place.

Moreover, I would feel more comfortable with “specified complexity” if such complexity actually were specified, with, say, a number that might be compared to other numbers. Making definitive claims based on a qualitative judgment like this strikes me as utterly unscientific. Even guessing the probability of a hand of poker is a feat of considerable skill; how are we ever to trust our judgment on the likelihood of genetic mutations? To claim that something is insufficiently probable requires numbers, not just fancy terms with a… specified… mathematical ring.

I would also feel more comfortable with specified complexity if it did not seem to take the following form:

1. If a designer created life on Earth, then that life would exhibit a specified complexity.
2. Life exhibits a specified complexity.
3. A designer must have created life on Earth.

This is no more than affirming the consequent, for it neglects the possibility that complexity, however specified, might have come about through other means.

Politics: Whatever Dembski’s scientific claims may be, he saved his trump cards for last. Disturbingly, they are political. The scientific establishment, Dembski writes, may well support evolution. But the masses do not, and the masses control the purse strings of the academy. “This disconnect can be exploited,” he writes. It’s chilling, to say the least.

In essence, Dembski is arguing that the consensus opinion of those who study biology does not matter–and that truth, as understood by those in a position to know, does not matter either. All that matters are the purse strings. (Is there anything either scientific or Christian about this opinion? I have trouble seeing either.)

Dembski’s advice to skeptics: At the end of the article, Dembski offers some advice for those who would see evolution more widely accepted. The most interesting of these suggestions is to “paint a more appealing world picture” of evolution. I hate to say it, but here he is entirely correct. I doubt Dembski would even have offered the advice, except that he figures we have so little chance of carrying it out.

Humans want desperately to believe that they are more than mere chance arrangements of molecules that just happen to survive and replicate. They want not only order, but Order. Dembski knows quite well that the story of God and the soul and the afterlife is quite often considered inspiring, and that the biological account of human life is cold–lifeless, even. Intelligent Design may or may not be religious–Dembski has said both at times–but it certainly has a power and a mystery to it, its the emotional appeal that keeps the votes and the purse strings set firmly against evolution, no matter how much the scientific establishment embraces it.

Never mind that it’s actually quite easy to reconcile the immortal soul, the Judgment, and the Divine with evolution. How? Simply define the soul as that perfect memory of our lives that is stored in the mind of God, combined with the God’s knowledge of how that life might continue under the conditions that He sets for it. In this scenario, seeking evidence for or against the soul here on earth is like looking for ‘a good conversation’ in your spice rack. But this is not to say that good conversation is impossible or nonexistent.

The idea of the soul as a divine memory or impression of an otherwise physical life could easily reconcile theism with Darwinian evolution, as even a few minutes’ thought makes clear. But Dembski isn’t interested in reconciling anything. It seems he only wants to destroy the theory evolution–at whatever the cost. And he’s willing to co-opt, even to imperil, the religious sense of grandeur to do it, by tying that grandeur irrevocably to a set of scientific claims that may not even succeed. A word comes to mind; it is “prostitution.”

So… Many of us can and do find grandeur and meaning in the worldview of unguided, unobserved evolution (here is a great example of what I mean, and more writings like it would certainly be helpful in answering the challenge at hand). But to those who still need a supernatural crutch, I think I may have supplied one. And may the god of the atheists have mercy on my soul.

It is always satisfying to see an intelligent person agreeing with me. Here, Andrew Sullivan compares anti-gay attitudes anti-Semitism. It’s a point I also made several months ago.

More stuff this evening, but for now it’s back to work…

Update: Jon Rowe also agrees.

A look at madness, evil, eccentricity, and the boundaries they often share.

Jacob Sullum has a must-read review of the new compilation Szasz Under Fire in Reason Online. The following will give you an idea of Szasz’s take on mental illness and moral evil:

In 1980 Thomas Szasz testified for the prosecution in the trial of Darlin June Cromer, a 34-year-old white woman charged with kidnapping and murdering Reginald Williams, a 5-year-old black boy. There was no question that Cromer, who attracted suspicion because she had a history of talking about “killing niggers” and trying to lure black children into her car, had abducted Reginald from an Oakland, California, supermarket, strangled him, and buried his body near her home. She had told police as much when they questioned her. Neither was her motive in doubt. She explained that “it is the duty of every white woman to kill a nigger child,” telling a jail psychologist she hoped to ignite a race war.

But as the San Francisco Chronicle reported, Cromer’s attorney argued that “his client killed because she is consumed by schizophrenic paranoia–not hate for blacks.” Or as the lawyer put it, “This case does not involve racism; it involves insanity.”…

Asked “what [Cromer] was suffering from, if anything,” on the day of the murder, Szasz offered the following opinion based on her records: “She was suffering from the consequences of having lived a life very badly, very stupidly, very evilly… From the time of her teens, for reasons which I don’t know…whatever she [has] done, she has done very badly.”

If we can’t say that a racist child murderer is evil, then we have entirely lost the meaning of the word.

But besides excusing actual evil, psychiatry can also stigmatize eccentricity as being like evil: A gray middle ground emerges, encompassing everyone from the murderous to the rude.

The gray area is of course political. The obvious example is homosexuality; another might be excessive religious fervor. Certain circles consider each a mental illness–and why? Say this quietly: In their respective corners, the far left and far right would both love to institutionalize their foes.

In some places, they’re already doing it. Consider this story about a young man in reprogramming camp to “correct” his homosexuality. God bless America, he’s blogging the abuse. Hang in there, Zach. You’re my hero.

Conservatives ought to know better than to subject Americans to abuse like this; in the Reason piece, Sullum recalls how communist states likewise used psychiatry to quash dissent. Let us not go down this road. Eccentricity is the heart of freedom, just as it is the heart of mental illness, and those who care about the former would do well to view the latter with caution.

As Szasz writes, “Typically, physical illnesses are identified by observing the patient’s body,” while “typically, mental illnesses are identified by observing the patient’s verbal pronouncements.” Adjust the content of those verbal pronouncements properly, and we may enact any sort of tyranny we wish; the one we have today is merely the tyranny most agreeable to the large majority of Americans.

I want to find these arguments compelling. Quite often I do. Yet I’m not ready to give up on mental illness entirely. As Sullum writes near his conclusion,

To a large extent, then, the issue of involuntary treatment comes down to a question of where the burden of proof should lie and how heavy it should be. Even those who are skeptical of psychiatric pretensions cannot easily dismiss [the] invocation of “the young man, rocking back and forth in a pool of his own urine, responding to voices from ‘a CIA computer’ that are instructing him to kill himself.” If such a person is indeed suffering from an incapacitating brain disease, it should be possible to allow his family to make treatment decisions on his behalf. At the same time, anyone who cares about liberty has to hesitate before imposing treatment on someone who insists he does not want it.

It’s a strong argument, but it leads far into the realms where science is still uncertain. The strongest reply I can offer is that if our young man really is suffering from a debilitating brain illness, then it is pointless to “treat” that illness without a known etiology or even a reliable cure. I am not certain what to do with him, as treating him against his will, to no effect, seems monstrous–yet if he really is ill, then letting him kill himself is equally monstrous, or more.

Is this young man evil? He is clearly living very far from the virtuous life, but so long as I cannot identify a material cause, I am forced to conclude that he may simply be living badly through choices of his own. If this is the case, I may try to reason with him–but nothing more. This sounds provocative, I know, but see my essay “Evil Robots” for an elaboration of the argument.

In the meantime, I would be very interested to hear from my readers and blog neighbors on what they think of the intersection of madness, freedom, and involuntary treatment.

In the early years, Cracker Barrel struggled to find a niche.

Then there’s this, which shows that maybe there’s a grain of truth to it after all.

In the comments below, Tom Chatt points out an essay by Elaine Showalter drawing a parallel between Michael Jackson and Oscar Wilde. It’s not a perfect match–nothing in history ever is–but it’s definitely worth a read.