Fact or Opinion?
Filed Under Big Ideas, Philosophy, Politics, Porchy | 7 Comments
I remember way back in the 3rd grade being taught the difference between a fact and an opinion. Actually I was taught the difference between a statement of fact vs a statement of opinion. The difference is crucial because it helps to clarify something that people get wrong when discussing politics…a lot.
I won’t be delving at all into the deep philosophical traditions that inform our understanding of knowledge. I’m going to stick right there at the 3rd grade level so bear with me.
Is this a statement of fact of a statement of opinion?
Ice cream is a good dessert.
That’s right, this is an opinion. How do we know that? Well, right off the bat, you will note that this is the kind of statement to which somebody might conceivably disagree and still be allowed to remain a professional lawyer, doctor, or therapist. But it isn’t just that one can disagree with a statement that makes it an opinion. I can disagree with all kinds of verifiable truths; I’d just be wrong. It’s the notion of judgment inherent in the statement that deems it so.
OK, that was easy. Try this one:
Teaching children how to read poems is beneficial to society.
This one is trickier, especially to the general readership of this blog. Why? Because you likely already agree with this statement and therefore believe it must be a fact. But this is an opinion too! How do we know? It’s tucked away inside that word “beneficial.” What things are beneficial, i.e. good, for society? Who judged them so? Do we all agree that what you think is good I also think is good? Certainly students of history know that certain very important people once condemned actors to the seedy side of the Thames even when the plays they performed were written in verse, that Plato once made no room in his Republic for those that would dare tell stories in another’s voice and thereby be lying. And certainly we have all read or written lyrics that would be best off forgotten and certainly not taught to anybody.
I know it gets tricky and I accept that the real world can be even more complex that the caged examples I’ve already provided, but bear with me.
What about this:
LA is 2443.79 southwest of New York.
Now, I’m not going to quibble about a few feet, or whether the measurement here is provided from metropolitan border to metropolitan border or if it was geographic center to geographic center. Let’s say the measurement here is correct. It’s OK, it’s not a trick question, this is a fact.
But what about this:
The closest Earth ever gets to the sun is 221,463 miles.
Actually no, this is the closest Earth gets to the moon. But notice I didn’t ask you if the statement was true or false. I asked you whether it was a statement of fact or a statement of opinion. The answer is that this is a statement of fact. It just turns out that a person uttering this phrase would also be wrong. Certainly we all understand that a statement does not turn from a fact to an opinion on the basis of it being factually wrong at a later date.
Aha! But check out that True or False thing I just mentioned there. You see, basically, opinions are statements of judgment and they indicate that some value is being placed on something or some state of affairs. A fact is a claim made about reality.
Now, we can muddy the waters a little bit. Take this sentence (and now I move a little closer to politics):
Lower speed limits will reduce traffic-related fatalities.
Fact or opinion? Well, there have been a lot of studies done on this. We know for example that the average person hit with a car traveling at < 25mph is likely to live even if injured. And that increasing the speed by X% mph increases fatalities by >X% , such that there is a higher proportion of fatalities above and beyond the actual percentage in speed increase. That makes this statement sort of straightforwardly a statement of fact.
But we also know that the posted speed limit is not necessarily, and is in fact rarely, the highest speed traveled on that road. That is, people speed. In this case the speed limit has no effect on fatalities…unless people obey the speed limit.
And what would cause them to obey the speed limit? Not just higher fines, if that’s what you were thinking, but a higher level of enforcement–or the appearance of a higher level enforcement (such as police cruisers parked on the shoulder). But also psychological factors like painting closer lane dividing lanes such that slower speeds appear dangerously faster etc. But these seem to move us beyond the realm of factors contained in the sentence.
That may seem digressionary but if we know how complicated the scenario really is how strange would this sentence sound?
It is my considered opinion, as a safety consultant and highway engineer with 25 years of experience, that lowering speed limits would significantly lower fatalities on America’s highways.
But certainly this is not a judgment in the sense of saying whether or not lower traffic fatalities is good or bad. It’s a simple claim that is either true or false and therefore, one would assume, provably so. Such is language. People will say things are opinions when they are, in actuality, claims of fact. They will do this even if they are not trying to protect themselves from attack. It’s a means of hedging, of not sounding to pedagogical, too in-your-face.
Just as with the “Earth to the Sun” or the “NY to LA” claims above, rightness or wrongness of a claim does not make it not a statement of fact. The highway engineer in the second sentence is wrong, he is not making an opinion he is making an educated guess as to the results of a policy, results that are demonstrably true or false after the fact. The infinity of variables clouds our notion of causality here. What if the policy in question were adopted at the same time that a smoking ban goes into effect causing 18% of the area’s drunk drivers to start drinking at home? Do we say that the engineer’s policy lowered fatalities or do we credit the smoking ban? Can we effectively isolate the two factors to see how much of the decrease should be apportioned to both laws?
Even if we could never prove the engineer right or wrong, that doesn’t diminish the factual nature of the claim.
Likewise, when we say that Obama is a socialist, that is not a statement of opinion. That is a statement of fact–a point on which you can be theoretically right or wrong even if no one can convince you of your wrongness. I pick on that one, but of course there are countless others made about politics all the time. And the reason is more-or-less straightforward.
Political science is a social science. It exists at the intersection of anthropology, sociology, psychology, economics and history. It’s mathematics are probability and statistics. It’s major polling data is self-reported before the fact and a multi-variant after-the-fact econometrics. As such it’s statements of certainty are somewhat soft: “Most of the people, most of the time” “might” do this or that “given the presence of these factors.”
The abundance of soft claims determined by averages and a relatively small set of instances on which to base future predictions makes all statements of fact somewhat wishy-washy. But, like the traffic engineer above, hedging is not the same as opinion-making. A hypothesis is not an opinion. Being wrong doesn’t make a claim an opinion in hindsight. Since anecdotes and marginal cases challenge the authority of every political science claim, everybody thinks they can make statements of fact that are forgivably wrong. And if their belief is questioned, they claim the right to their “opinion” as if having an unsupported opinion is somehow a class of speech protected from attack by virtue of everyone having one.
Sometimes, in political science, as in everything else, we make leaps of faith and wait for the scientific literature to bear us out on our beliefs, but even beliefs are not the same as opinions. If we are to be the type of people who make intelligent choices about who we vote for and who understand the likely effects of those choices, we would be wise to adjust our beliefs to match the facts. And to do that, we must be able to separate fact from “opinion” and, of course, true beliefs from false ones. Again, I recognize the difficulty of weighing competing factual claims where the evidence is a muddle of statistical regressions. But there’s simply no excuse for messing up as an adult what an attentive person learned when they were nine.
My Turing Test
Filed Under Big Ideas, Familiar Essay, Philosophy, Politics, Technology, TheMCP | Comments Off
The Edge of the American West has an admirable commentary on Gordon Brown’s public apology for the British government’s shabby treatment of computer scientist war hero Alan Turing. I won’t go through the details of history.
I first learned about Turing in a college introduction to philosophy class, where we didn’t discuss his biography at all. We discussed the “Turing test,” an experiment that some believe can reveal whether or not a computer program is actually intelligent. I thought the idea was interesting, but after the class I filed it away in my mental lumber room.
I met Turing again many years later, while planning a 3-week unit on the history of computers for a class of mixed 7th and 8th graders. For the first time, I learned about his sexuality. His harassment by the government that he had served so well. His subsequent suicide.
I have to confess – as appalled as I was – a little voice wondered if I shouldn’t leave it out. I was a new teacher at a conservative rural school. I began to rationalize: All that stuff about poisoned apples and meetings with 19-year old men at movie theaters in Manchester doesn’t really relate to the history of the development of the modern computer.
Of course, I was completely wrong. But I was a young teacher, with visions of children going home and complaining to their parents, visions of meetings with school administrators. Maybe I even had fears of my own sexuality being too closely examined.
In the end my conscience won out. On the cover letter of the very resume I used to get my job, I wrote that I wanted to “Help children use technology to make the world a better place.” And I’m afraid I believed it. In a class about computer science, how often does one have a chance to teach a moral lesson about justice and humanity? If anyone was ever wronged, Turing was wronged.
I spent a full week of the three-week unit on Turing. The kids were properly horrified at his mistreatment. A few kids were predictably bigoted. But I received no angry calls from parents. The principal did not have a meeting with me in the office. This was in the year 2000, I think. And believe it or not, fewer people seemed to be fired about up with anti-gay rhetoric back then.
Would I teach the same lesson plan today? Yes. Would I get the same response? I dunno. The rhetoric has grown angrier, more reactionary, and more vocal in the past 10 years. While the larger society has inched towards more tolerance, the divisions between the mainstream and the vocal bigots are more fiercely contested.
And to bring it back to Alan Turing: before we slap ourselves on the back for growing more open and tolerant, let’s remember that we live in a country where men and women of the armed services who serve their country equally as heroically can be tossed out and forgotten merely for admitting that they are gay.
Have a Cup of Tea!
Filed Under Big Ideas, Philosophy, Politics, Porchy, Religion | 2 Comments
In this article shared by FoP JamesCochran the blogger quotes a long passage by Thich Nhat Hanh (who has too many silent Hs for my taste) before waxing philosophic on the nature of the old New Age stand by, Be in the Now.
I now it sounds like I’m being condescending but I’m not–I’m sorry, that’s just how I talk. Many of the best lessons that have snuck their way into Western culture from Buddhism and Taoism via the lunatic fringe of Hippiedom–sound very simple but are in fact lifelong exercises in patience, humility, and acceptance.
Take for example simple meditation–correct breathing. It sounds simple enough, and yet, it is very difficult to get right. But at the same time, if you overthink it, if you make it too hard, you’re doing it wrong. It’s the exact same balancing act you learned when first riding on two wheels. It’s very simple and very hard at the same time.
Or quieting the inner monologue. All of us think in our heads in something that we might call “our voice.” That is, we think in words that we pretend to hear even though the “voice” is already in our heads and doesn’t pass through our ear drums. Don’t think about this too hard at work or you won’t be able to stand yourself. It gives me phantom pains in my ears as they strain to hear the voice that isn’t there. What we fail to notice is that this inner monologue runs virtually nonstop and if we try to stop it from “talking”–one of the goals of meditation–it tends to start talking about how it isn’t talking. It may even congratulate us for being able to stop it so quickly. We’re so accustomed to hearing this voice we may chat at ourselves for several minutes in this way before we realize the trap we’ve fallen into.
The mantra is supposed to help with this. By forcing our inner voice to repeat one word or phrase over and over again we prevent it from chatting about whatever it wants. But the mantra is a trap too. Once we’ve trained the inner voice to say just the one thing, we are supposed to let go of the mantra and say nothing. Good luck with that. Certain teachers have said if any of us could really do this for just one second, we’d be enlightened.
And of course, living in the present is incredibly difficult. No one ever teaches us how to do this. They do teach us to use our imagination. And living in the past and in the future is really just a variation on a theme. The past and the present are both fantasy worlds created from certain prompts. The past is recreated from the limited data we took in at the moment from the single vantage point we had; and it is flavored by the interpretation we gave those events at the time, the things we’ve learned since then; and it is tarnished from all the things we’ve forgotten in the meantime. The future is built from our current understanding of things which will change as we learn more things and as we reinterpret our and others’ pasts.
But how do live in the present? Since nobody I knew growing up had any idea, nobody could teach me. How does it feel? What signs do I look for to know if I’m doing it right? If I’m especially gifted can I make a facsimile of living in the present merely be living in the past of one second ago? It’s still the past, but the past of extremely recent vintage. Is that all that’s meant by living in the present? Can I actually–physically–do better than one instant ago? Or is it a spiritual leap to move from one instant ago to the elusive Now?
This is all to say that a lot of the advice one reads on how to do this involves doing one thing as an end unto itself, immerse yourself in it, do not intellectualize it, do not remember it, do not remember previous instances of that single act, do not rush to the next act while in the process of performing the current act. Just do this one thing and that is living in the present. The purpose of doing this, we are often told, is that if we do not, if we sort of zombie through our lives, unconsciously participating in the humdrum, then we never enjoy anything. The implication of course is that the purpose of living in the now is to enjoy everything more.
The trap is sort of self-evident at this point, isn’t it? If we wash the dishes for the purpose of enjoying washing the dishes, then we are not washing the dishes as an end unto itself, but seeking enjoyment in the mundane.
Moreover, why one act? No act of living is ever done in isolation. Why do I enjoy going to the cinema–a very immersive experience? It’s because I enjoy watching a movie while at the same time sitting in a theater–and yes, the Buddhist have no problem recognizing “sitting in a theater” as an act I can do, immerse myself in, and enjoy.
Walking on the beach is not the same as walking in the woods, two different acts I enjoy immensely. When I walk–on the beach, let’s say–I enjoy the walking and I enjoy the iodine breeze, I enjoy the hot sun, I enjoy the sweat that rises and dries on my arms and back, I enjoy the cry of gulls, and all the rest.It could be argued that I enjoy them all as one experience and that’s why I enjoy it as an experience distinct from walking in the woods. But to think that walking along the beach is a totally different experience is to deny a lot of similarities: the walking, the call of birds, sweat, wind.
This is all a lead up to this: The Zenist especially like to emphasize the solitary joy of a cup of tea. This is something we can and should slow down to enjoy as a singular instant in time. And it’s true the best teas are subtle and demand contemplation to really enjoy. But I quite like the immersive experience of drinking coffee while reading the news. I could do either thing and try to live in the now with just that act, but I would enjoy each act slightly less than I enjoy them together. And for that matter, while enjoying a cup of coffee is something I could reasonably do as and end unto itself, reading the news is not.
Reading the news is a ritual act of the material world. It has only practical and not spiritual ends. I certainly can read the news to understand what others are going through in the world, to extend my empathy and to rehearse the human experience as part of a process of maintaining and perfecting my humanity–but I think this is something that happens rather than something I do. And I can get the same experience through novels and poems which are easier and more fun to read as well. But I read the news because I think it’s important–which is a distraction from the life the Zenists want me to lead.
One of the peculiarities of Zen, and a lot of the other Eastern liberation philosophies, is that all the advice ultimately collapses into something like “live your life.” All of Buddhism follows simply and directly from the Four Noble Truths which are, although controversial, indisputable (except perhaps the fourth, but that’s for a different day). Being in the Now; quieting the inner monologue (“the inner critic,” some people say); breathing properly; not getting too wrapped up in culture, objects, or other peoples’ lives. These things characterize your life and it is that which you must learn to live. Thou art that, Aldous Huxley recognized as a principle concept of most world faiths.
As a result of the continual collapse of Buddhist advice, Buddhist literature becomes horribly redundant and uninteresting. At the same time, reading and re-reading the experiences of people learning the truth of the Four Noble Truths is an important process of the contemplative life that leads to a cessation of suffering. It’s like having to relearn riding a bicycle everyday, easy becomes hard becomes easy becomes hard. Everything is a trap, everything is escape.
I try to keep my blogging on things political. But I don’t see any reason not to take a breather and try to keep all this in perspective. There’s no reason you have to give yourself over to New Ageism to appreciate what the Zenists are offering here.
As part of Italianfest a couple of weeks ago I attended a Catholic mass which very much reminded me of the few masses I attended with my grandparents when I was a kid (for them though there was less Italian and more Latin readings). The sermon on that day was on the importance of using mass as a part of the week to quiet the inner monologue, to think not of ourselves but of universal Truth and universal Love. Of course the priest was talking of a Christian concept of God but that doesn’t make his advice dismissable from other perspectives. Truth and Love, to the extent you can separate them, are important things to think upon and doing so helps us to shed the pettiness that can creep into our lives–the nitpicking and the judgment that we turn into Very Important things–dramas in which we can take on a role. When someone is doing something that is worthy of Judgment, we can be Offended. These things make us feel important like we are doing something. They are imagined facsimiles of “living our lives” but worse than living in the past or the future because they manifest a patina of the Now. We are offended now, so we must be living in the now. But judgment, like analysis in social science, does not derive from facts, but is built on secondary assumptions, they are synthetic creations of our imagination. They are pretend truths we can talk to others about or write papers about but ultimately they are not real.
Which is why it’s good practice as observers of the world, to think on the universal–whatever that means to you–because that is truly large and reduces everything else to identically small motes of dust. This is the kind of humility that renders judgment useless, petty, and ridiculous. The removal of the “I” — a central component of the Buddhist philosophy, was also the central message that day in Mass.
If having a cup of tea (coffee) is the kind of spiritual practice we can use to keep our mind focused on the universal, then I see no contradiction in doing so while I’m reading the news. As a matter of fact, I feel obliged to combine the spiritual with the pragmatic. It’s the kind of holistic contrast wrapped up in the Yin-Yang symbol that certain classes of people feel compelled to tattoo on their lower back. Both Christianity and Buddhism as a matter of philosophical truth consider mankind as liminal figures living out their lives neither wholly physical nor spiritual. Why should we ever deny one of our realities for the other?
So I say, as you’re bouncing around the internets today, reading the news, reading dirty jokes, watching You Tube videos and whatnot, be sure to have a cup of tea. Think of it as your duty to your brothers and sisters. Or do not think of it at all.
Is Obama a Secret Muslim? The Role of Reputation in Politics
Filed Under Barack Obama, Domestic Politics, Foreign Affairs Desk, In the News, Israel, Philosophy, Politics, Porchy | 1 Comment
As I mentioned earlier, I’m going through some old flagged blog posts that I’d always hoped to blog on and have now made that a priority. Luckily nutball national security analyst Frank Gaffney has given me a good opportunity to do that and make my comments fairly relevant (double bonus: I get to knock out two starred blog posts to do it!).
Frank Gaffney, a presumably educated individual, still thinks, despite all evidence to the contrary that:
“there is mounting evidence that the president not only identifies with Muslims, but actually may still be one himself.”
As Yglesias notes, the “evidence” that Gaffney is pulling from amounts to nothing more than Obama giving a speech in Cairo and not threatening to bomb all of Islam back to the age of Mohammed.
However the evidence to the contrary, that is, that Obama is Christian, is far greater and requires far less mind reading. You can think what you want of Jeremiah Wright’s political leanings, but there is little doubt that the church–the church that Obama attended for two decades–is a Christian church. There is further a lack of anything like Muslim orthodoxy in any report of Obama. He doesn’t abide Muslim eating requirements, doesn’t pray at the right times every day, doesn’t face toward Mecca, etc etc.
Perhaps most importantly, Obama says he is a Christian. As a matter of fact. Obama invokes Jesus and Christianity in his speeches more than the born-again evangelical George W. Bush.
Now, Tony Perkins, quoted in the above-linked story both says that hearing Obama invoke Jesus is “a comfort” and that there’s “a political motivation” behind his utterances and I don’t think these two feelings are necessarily in opposition. I think that Obama can be a Christian and hope to benefit politically from this fact. Why not? Every president before him has been a Christian and at least attempted to relate to his voters by virtue of this alignment. Even the deist Thomas Jefferson was fond of quoting God in his writings.
But the sheer number of Christian invocations when taken into consideration along with the fact that 11% of the country still think Obama is a Muslim calls into question two things: the durability of reputation and whether or not we should care.
I’ll tackle the second one first. Should we care if Obama is a secret Muslim? I argue we shouldn’t. First of all, there is no provision anywhere that the president of the United States must be a Christian or for that matter be religious at all. So there’s certainly no legal ground from which we can launch an attack against a Muslim president for being Muslim.
Furthermore, as I’ve already said on this blog, regardless of whether a president, in his private life is a Muslim, Christian, Jew, Hindu, Buddhist, or “other” he (or she) is certain to violate more than a few of their religions’ tenets. That is to say, they will violate so many in the course of governing the country that they can hardly even be considered religious at all. Not only will they violate these tenets they 1) enter the profession knowing it will call upon them to do so and 2) they will persist in the profession even after they have done so and knowing they will be called on to do it again–which violates any reasonable standard of penance for their sinning. So unless we adopt a Weberian model of the suffering political martyr who condemns his own soul to Hell so that others don’t have to, we have to admit that politicians are never of the faith they profess.
But I think Hans Noel at The Monkey Cage flushes out the real reasons we shouldn’t care if Obama is a secret Muslim or not…or for that matter…why we shouldn’t care if he suddenly came out as a not-to-secret Muslim: namely–that his accountability would still be primarily to American Christians, American Jews and American business and political interests that are primarily run by American Christians and American Jews.
Noel’s argument is simple enough. Regardless of what Obama, or indeed any politician personally believes about anything, if they want to maintain their power they will attempt to cater their policies to the people who can best help them maintain that power. So it doesn’t matter if Obama personally thinks that a cap-and-trade scheme is the best thing for the country. What matters is what he thinks he can get passed that will 1) at best engender more support or 2) at least not cost him too much.
In today’s political climate it is unlikely that Obama is going to push an agenda that is so Muslim-friendly as to cost him his job and that’s true even if he’s a Muslim.
In regard to the first concern above, reputation, I almost provocatively titled this post “How many Muslims must Obama torture before he earns a reputation as a Christian?” as an homage to this intelligent post at Lawyers, Guns and Money [How many pirates do the French have to kill to earn a reputation for toughness?] In this post blogger Robert Farley points out that the idea that the French are “surrender monkeys” is so ingrained in our collective psyche that we tend to view all of their actions through this lens. If they act with any sort of timidity we interpret this as proof of their acquiescent attitude. If they act with any sort of toughness we treat this not only as anomolous but as a cynical attempt to alter their well-deserved reputation.
But reputation is a strange bird. Obama has a reputation as a Muslim for better or worse. Certain biographical facts provide the grain of truth needed to keep conspiracy theorists in business. His middle name is Hussein. His father was Kenyan. He knows some Indonesian (and may be to some extent conversationally fluent). Politically he’s shown a willingness to confront Israel on their settlement issue and shown some sympathy to the Palestinian cause. And of course, the most recent trespass, he actually gave a speech in Cairo.
Why Obama giving a speech in Cairo is suddenly evidence that he’s Muslim but Bush’s repeated meetings with Hu Jin Tao didn’t implicate Bush as a closet atheist is anybody’s guess.
But what’s true of international politics is often true of domestic politics, a theme I’ve covered before here at Porch Dog. In the same way that those who believe that the French are surrender monkeys are likely to interpret toughness from the French as a purposeful and cynical attempt to trick us, those that believe Obama is a Muslim will continue to believe that his assertions to the contrary are a little “The lady doth protest too much.” The fact that he invokes Jesus more than Bush did is just evidence of his”protesting too much.”
But this leads commentators like Gaffney into desperate waters. They are eventually forced to admit that without evidence one way or the other, what politicians they like (Bush) say they can take at face value and what politicians the don’t like (Obama) say they must question, seeking the truth in the subtext. But why what one politician says can be taken at face value while the other one must be deconstructed is never explained. Eventually commentors like Gaffney will be caught in an embarassing “I looked into his eyes” moment.
I still maintain, like Noel, that the thrust of our understanding of what a politician will do should be what he has done. Our understanding of a politician’s personal life is largely inconsequential and will always be incomplete–even after the completion of the official memoirs where a politician will be hyper-concious of steam cleaning his image for the purpose of posterity.
Letter to a Tea Bagger
Filed Under Big Ideas, Domestic Politics, Patriotism, Philosophy, Politics, Porchy, Rant, USA | 3 Comments
Our founding document, and we only have one, does not deal with the reality that is man’s inhumanity to man. It spells out a series of ideals about to what end and by what means our government should be organized, but it does not address why any government is necessary to begin with. For that we look, not to the Constitution but rather to Federalist #51 authored by James Madison (and in so doing, I am aware I invite a fair amount of deconstructive criticism):
It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.
Now Madison was writing #51 primarily to assuage fears that the new government would quickly turn monarchical (and he was addressing the dangers of a government led by popular rule). He was explaining to the concerned that those in charge of penciling the founding document were quite aware of the natural tendency of governments to grow despotic over time. And he was explaining that certain mechanisms would be put in place to prevent this development. But right at the beginning he sets down what exactly has gone wrong with governments so that proper policies could be implemented to prevent that corruption from taking hold. The sickness in previous governments was human nature. He specifically addresses ambition, which makes the allusion of “a government of angels” an intriguing one. It’s not as if an 18th Century audience would have been unfamiliar with the notion of what motivates angels to form governments (and in an act of revolution, no less). But I digress.
Madison did not have to stop with pride (ambition). His predecessors in the world of political philosophy did not. Hobbes and Machiavelli describe human nature in a way that I find most useful when talking about the how’s and wherefore’s of governance. In truth, both writers are a tad too cynical for my tastes. I doubt I would, as Machiavelli does, talk of man’s basest desires and modes as if they were as ever-present and ubiquitous as he seems to think they are. But I believe that enough humans display enough avarice, sloth, covetousness, etc to undermine our collective social project–that is, living side-by-side.
So while the Constitution sets up a government, as Nick says, intended to protect certain inalienable rights, it does so because there are men among us that seek to take those rights away.
At this point, everything I’ve said could be taken in total by either Republican or Democrats, by conservatives or by liberals. Some individuals would reject this concept of human nature as being overly pessimistic, and in rejecting it they may claim that their political philosophy is incompatible with such a view of man. But the truth is that I’ve known people of various political stripes that share this notion. I’ve also known people of various political stripes that have denied this notion. Which is to say that there is nothing necessary about our concept of human nature that leads us to one set or another of political fundamentals, pessimism can be enjoyed by all!
However, for those who accept this notion, what comes next says a lot about your specific character. If you accept that humans are fundamentally flawed (and yes, we can spend some time debating whether “flawed” is the right word here) then you must ask yourself what we should do about it as we try to organize a society where as many of our inalienable rights can be respected as is possible.
Objectivists and those with libertarian leanings arrive at a series of policy decisions that rest upon a set of secondary notions that I simply do not share. It is also true, of course, that those with a more optimistic view of man also present an intractable challenge in political reconciliation. But in my experience, the fundamentally flawed nature of man is a more or less agreed upon starting point, and most political disagreements follow from the potential world we conceive given these set of weaknesses.
What Nick did in his comment on Thursday was to challenge the sophistication of my political understanding. He called me naive and at one point said,” The funny thing is, you blindly argue on behalf of the federal government, but you couldn’t tell me where half of our money is spent and simply where it is wasted,” implying that I was not only uninformed but was writing that post in bad faith.
Fair’s fair, I suppose. I used words like “naive,” “uninformed” and “liars” when I was talking about the Tea Baggers and I did not make it clear who was who and I should have because, as with all movements of any size, it is very difficult to talk about them as one homogeneous mass. So allow me to draw some lines.
The Liars in question are primarily movement leaders who know full well that we are nowhere near a 2nd American Revolution and said we were anyway. The liars were those who claimed that what was happening was “taxation without representation” when they knew full well that the mechanisms of representation set up 200+ years ago were never derailed during this process.
The uniformed and naive are the ones that believed them.
If Nick was none of those things, then more power to him. I tend to think, after perusing his blog that he isn’t among the ones so accused, but given the way I wrote about the events, how can I blame him for feeling attacked? But even as Nick himself admits on his blog:
One thing that hurts the Republican party (as I am sure it hurts all parties) is the nuts. Everyone is entitled to their opinions, but I can see how some people’s opinions run off sane people. I won’t post who these people support (candidacy wise), but most of them are loons! I’m not talking about the speakers…I’m talking about some of the people in the crowd.
So to the uninformed, naive, and liars, yes, I also add loons. And I agree with Nick here, it is unfair to characterize an entire movement by its fringe components whether those fringes are liars or loonies.. At the same time, to some extent the entire movement was populated by marginalized citizens. Take that for what it’s worth. Being part of a fringe movement doesn’t make you wrong, or crazy, or inconsequential per se. I am a member of several fringe movements whose causes I, obviously, believe in.
But by average polling we know that Obama and his economic policies are very popular, appealing to around 55% (44% say they disapprove). Of these numbers 35% say they strongly approve and only 29% say they strongly disapprove. The parity between figures here at first may seem striking but once social issues are placed aside the economy is the one clear line between conservatives and liberals. It’s not impressive that these figures are so close. What’s impressive, given how important this issue is and the wide set of legitimate contradictory theories available, is that the numbers aren’t even closer.
I don’t think it’s at all preposterous to say that the Tea Baggers came exclusively from the 29% of folks that strongly disapprove of the president’s actions. I would also go ahead and say that of that 29% there are those who would never feel strongly enough to attend a rally. That is to say that even giving them the benefit of all reasonable doubt, the best case scenario is that the Tea Baggers represent something south of 29% of voters knowledgeable enough to say something other than “no opinion.”
The rules of American governance, broadly speaking, are simple: majority rules. It is not always right and it doesn’t always lead us to where we want to be but it is the way that representation in this country has always worked. It is a fallacy to say that since <29% of the nation’s opinion is not currently being reflected by the president’s plan that there is “no representation” or, as Nick put it, there is “misrepresentation.” After 8 years of CAP-style Republican rule I can forgive Nick for assuming that his every economic whim should be made manifest in the halls of the Capitol, but I hope it’s clear to others that this assumption that the government has an obligation to enact the law that this minority of people want stems from a sense of entitlement, not that far removed from the sense of pride that Madison already warned us about.
As I said before, the Tea Baggers have every right to make their opinion known through organized protests of any sort allowed by law. And they, of course, have the right to lie about whatever they want. But I neither have to like their opinion nor tolerate their lies in silence.
And so I will answer some specific charges in Nick’s comment. I will not comment in too much depth because I have already made my feelings on libertarianism known and I suspect that as time goes on I will flush out these differences more and more. But I will comment on some errors of fact that either Nick expressed himself or accused me of:
- First of all, those weren’t “my numbers” they were the numbers I got from 538.com. You don’t like them, take it up with them; it’s why I provided a link. Moreover at the time 538 didn’t have a reliable report of the 15,000 Atlanta protesters, but once they did they corrected it. I didn’t see the correction until after Nick’s comment. That wasn’t bad faith on my part. As far as the 2,500 figure that Nick claims from Augusta: 538′s number of 2,000 was provided by the official police estimate of the crowd. I’ll take the educated guess of professional crowd controllers over Nick’s opinion here. It behooves him and his argument for there to be more people. However, since my argument is based on a maximum participation of ~ <29% of the entire population (est. 102 million people) most of which, even if they identified with the Tea Baggers, would not attend a rally my argument is unaffected by size. Keep our intentional differences in mind here.
- Nick claims that the American Revolutionaries were not a majority by April 19, 1775. That is either rooted in a misunderstanding of American history or a misunderstanding of the way revolutions work, or both. Estimates of last third of the 18th Century were that no more than 20% of those living in “America” were still loyal to the crown. While I understand the desire of the Tea Baggers to think that 20% is a “majority,” the fact is that it is not. You have a history book that says that 51% or more of New Worlders were loyal to the British crown, bring it. (Actually Nick claimed that they weren’t a minority “in the beginning,” which is not only problematic for him [when’s ‘the beginning’ but also is off topic since the phrase I was questioning did not say that we were ‘at the beginning’ but that it was ‘a very real possiblity’ claiming that it might be just beyond the horizon and with intended implications to that effect.)
- Nick claims, in the quote I put in the body of this post: that I 1) am arguing blindly for the federal government and 2) that I could not tell him where half our money is spent. 1) I ask that Nick read my blog a little more, including the post he commented on, to see who I am ever arguing for. This blog has repeatedly blogged against the government and for the people. The post in question blogged against Tea Baggers and for some honesty from the movement. The closest I got in arguing for the government is to say that the government is very popular right now– a piece of data pulled from a public opinion poll. You don’t have to be a slave to the Democratic Party to say that “according to recent polling, the president and his policies are very popular.” 2) I’m not sure how Nick can be confident that I, specifically, cannot tell him where half our money is spent. It’s a baseless charge.
- Nick claims that I’m giving Obama a blank check because he got elected with an “unimpressive” 7% of the vote. Obama pulled in the second highest number of voters as a percentage of the potential voting public. (Reagan in 1984 beat him by .47%). Out of all the people that voted, Obama got around 53% of their vote. Which is to say, he won, not with 7%, but with 53%. Nick is right to say that his 7% margin is “unimpressive” but it is also largely an artifact of population growth. A more accurate number divides the margin by the amount of available voters and … blah blah blah statistics blah. Doesn’t matter. What does matter is that Obama won with the voiced approval of 53% of the voters that chose to have their voices heard at all. That’s what made him president. He would have (if the Electoral College acted in good faith) won with 50.1%.
- And I’m not giving him a blank check. Nick has no comment from me in that post to support that claim. He needs me give Obama a blank check to bolster his argument and so he saw one that wasn’t there. Not only do I not give Obama blank check in that post, on other issues, I have been even more critical. What I did say was that the government, Obama included, is not obligated to take the Tea Bag protests into consideration. However, and I think this highlights some of the disingenuousness of the Tea Baggers. The original Obama stimulus plan had more spending and less tax breaks than the one that was passed. This compromised bill is evidence of the representation the Tea Baggers claim they don’t have. They might have preferred no plan at all, but I would have preferred something closer to (and bigger) that Obama’s original plan. The compromised bill is what happens when the opinion of 35% who strongly approve mixes with 29% that strongly disapprove. You still get a stimulus bill (majority rules) but it’s slightly smaller than the one the majority wants.
Yay democracy! Where nobody ever gets what they actually want.
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