Personal, Politics & Culture

The Privilege of Existential Ennui

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A few weeks ago, I heard via Rush Limbaugh’s radio program that happiness among males peaks in the late teen years, tumbles sharply in the 20s and 30s, and doesn’t really recover until after age 65.  Women are similarly situated, it seems.

I cannot admit to being much surprised by this.  For myself, I find a great deal of personal discontent that is only barely contained through various self-improvement projects.  Part of it is rooted in a sense of listlessness — a feeling that something is missing.  The standard answer might be “wife and children,” yet the happiness of those who married and procreated in their early or mid-20s isn’t any better, it seems, and at any rate, their life choices have constrained many of their options for radical change.

If it were just me, suffering from an occasional emotional funk, that might be one thing.  But it isn’t.  I’m not sure I know anyone who is genuinely happy with their current lot in life.  Some older friends are doing their best to reconcile their condition against their aspirations with as much stoicism as their emotional wounds will permit; some younger friends are full of incoherent, unfocused rage.  Others have simply given up, and allow themselves to drift through their days without direction or ambition.

So many people feel empty.  Purposeless.  As if something unspoken had passed them by, or that the opportunity for greatness has eluded them — perhaps forever.

People need to feel like they have a place and a purpose in this world; think of Maslow’s heirarchy of needs — in a world where most people don’t fear for their safety or immediate physical needs, self-actualization takes primacy of place.  Yet … Despair.com has a lovely demotivator:  “Not everyone gets to be an astronaut when they grow up.”  The challenge for the many who aspired to the stars is to reconcile with living upon the earth, especially when the popular culture sends the message that everyone can and should strap themselves to the rocketship.  What to think of yourself, when you must watch the lift-off from afar?

It is curious that the better-off we are, the more psychologically discontented we become.  It’s no accident that depression and recklessness tend to be middle- or upper-class phenomena, nor that most terrorists come from privileged backgrounds.  When you’re starving, satisfaction comes from eating; when your needs are met, satisfaction comes from self-actualization, which is becoming increasingly difficult to achive given the impossibility of integrating individual human goals with a fragmented, materialistic culture that emphasizes ideals — rooted in the fantasy of advertising and the “beautiful people elite” — that almost no actual, breathing human person can actually attain.

The inevitable response is dissatisfaction, the manifestation of which ranges from depression to ennui to violent outbursts of rage.  Oh, and self-deception.  Lots of self-deception:  a refusal to admit that one’s dreams and one’s abilities are not in sync.

Perhaps the mark of maturity is in finally internalizing the knowledge that “I am not God” — to understand that our potential is not infinite, and that we simply will not have a name that lasts through the generations.  We are ordinary people, despite our own self-importance, and embracing that ordinariness and making the best of it may well be the safest path to happiness.

Perhaps.

Part of me still vacillates between tiredness and motivation, between melancholy at was might have been, and zeal for what might yet be.  I’m not yet ready to accept the prospect of a plump wife with 2.3 kids and a used minivan in the suburbs.  Maybe I’m condemning myself to perpetual unhappiness.  Or perhaps I’m prudently refusing to settle for mediocrity, and that my day will eventually come.

The hell of it is, though — I won’t know which until it’s too late.  Game theory at its finest and most cruel.  C’est la vie.

Personal, Politics & Culture

Update, Take 12

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During an IM conversation with my new friend Will, it dawned on me that a lot of what I’ve put on this blog has been … safe.  A few years ago, the previous incarnation of this thing was much less restrained in terms of the subject-matter of my postings, and I ended up getting mildly burned for it during an interview.  So, when my old host had some unfortunate database problems, I simply recast A Mild Voice of Reason as something far less controversial.  Hence, the relatively infrequent postings that read more like a travelogue than a true blog.

I’ve been tracking several personal blogs, including some diary-type ones that are absolutely fascinating.  My chat with Will, and some e-mails with friends, plus a sense that I’ve kept my core personality under wraps for far too long, suggest a change in tactics.  We’ll see.

And … the obligatory update:

  1. I had a pleasant chat with Rick yesterday; he’s wrapping up a 10-day vacation.  Signs are positive that he’s actually going to finish his degree … hooray for Widdow Wicky!
  2. I also called Duane.  Been far too long, as usual.  He’s doing as well as can be expected given the trials of being a grad student in California.  If ever there was a non-Muslim who deserved his 70 virgins upon death, it’s Duane.  Unfortunately, he’d probably just make friends with them, and it’d stay platonic for all eternity.  But that’s exactly why he deserves them.  I’ll offer up a prayer to The Shania for his deliverance.
  3. I ended up being asked, at the last minute, to lead the weekly Catholic worship service in prison last Saturday.  It went well; the inmates in that facility are very easy to work with and astonishingly devout in their faith.  I’ve got to say, though — I have a new respect for preachers.  Part of my preparation was to deliver a “homily” of sorts that was supposed to last 15 minutes, and be based on the readings of the day.  So, I delivered a lecture on spiritual greed — which, judging by feedback during the “sharing” time, was well-received by the two-dozen men in attendance.  Still … delivering an extended reflection isn’t an easy task, and it requires much more prep work than I expected.
  4. This Saturday is belt-testing day at the dojo.  I intend to test for orange belt.  Our school’s ranking system has colored belts with up to four stripes (in order:  white, yellow, orange, green, blue, purple, brown) before hitting the dan ranks and the black belt.  Orange belt, at which level I should remain until January, is really the end of the road for the “building blocks” phase of karate; green belt and above is more intense and disciplined.  At any rate, these last eight months have been a tremendous growing experience, and I look forward to the next two years of training.
  5. I changed all of my phone numbers a few weeks ago.  My cell number switched from the Kalamazoo area code, to Grand Rapids, and I re-established cheap home service with AT&T (since that company provides my DSL coverage, anyway).  The only down side is that the previous holder of my new cell number apparently skipped out on some sort of debt, so I got spammed by a Texas company looking for her.  It took an escalation to a supervisor and the threat of a criminal harassment complaint for them to take the number out of their system.
  6. I also switched up all of my banking, too.  Completely.  New accounts, new payroll direct-deposit allocations, shiny new debit card with the American flag on it, everything.  And I feel good about it.

Enough for now, I suppose.

Politics & Culture

Swirling vortex of financial unreality

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Picture it:  I’m sitting in Astranaar, having a text chat with Duane, when as a tangent the question of credit reports came up. 

Let’s consider a hypothetical.  If Joe Blow Consumer wants to purchase a cell phone, he can go to a telecom store, select a phone and a service plan, and walk out the door with no difficulty or major financial outlay.  But if Mr. Consumer has a bad credit history, he can’t get a service plan; if he wants a cell phone, he has to resort to pre-paid plans, which can have substantially higher fees in the long-term than a person with sterling credit.

The story repeats itself.  People with great credit get preferred rates on auto loans, mortgages, banking services, and a host of not-insubstantial things.  And, truth be told, this makes sense; customers who don’t present a problem to a corporation probably do deserve some degree of consideration.

What bothers me, though, is that once you’re in a financial hole, transaction costs can loom so large that it’s much more difficult to get out.  I was going to purchase a pre-paid debit card for a friend in need last week, but the transaction costs associated with it would be enormous — $20 just to acquire the card, plus a host of per-transaction (and even per-inquiry!) fees attached to the card’s use, sometimes as much as $1 each.  It’d be better to just send a letter and a C-note or something.  But if you’re one of the “unbanked” and need recourse to a credit or debit card, your only option is to get prepaid plastic and pay through the nose for it.

Well, people who are in dire financial straits can’t pull themselves to a better place when a greater proprotion of their funds are allocated toward transaction fees.  It becomes a circle wherein the financial services sector’s rate structures serve as a virtual debtors’ prison, escape from which is extraordinarily difficult.

Duane’s observation is that this situation will likely never change, because the very people affected by these high costs don’t enjoy the political power to effect meaningful reform.  So the poor or the temporarily cash-strapped will remain trapped in a cycle of predatory fees.

I suppose I agree, but still.  It’s hard to build an opportunity society when the system itself is designed to divert a large chunk of the consumer base toward high-fee, low-reward financial services.

Politics & Culture

Reflections on the ’08 GOP Field

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Not too many are happy with the current, official GOP candidates.  Including me.

I was initially thrilled with the Giuliani candidacy; he was, after all, America’s Mayor, and he is tough on terror and tough on crime and tough on bad budgets.  Sure, he’s a bit wobbly on social issues, but that’s the direction the electorate is moving, anyway.  But then Rudy decided to thumb his nose at social conservatives, almost taunting them with his pronouncements on abortion and gay rights.  It’s one thing to support a candidate who doesn’t fully mesh with the base; it’s quite another to stand for a guy who deliberately draws sharp contrasts against the base for the edification of social liberals who aren’t going to vote for him anyway.

I supported John McCain’s early bid; he stood firmly with President Bush on the War on Terror, and he worked hard in the Senate before abdicating to run a full-time campaign.  But how tone-deaf do you have to be to sponsor legislation with Democrats that seems designed to run the GOP into the ground?  McCain-Feingold, McCain-Kennedy — has the gentleman from Arizona ever met a bad policy he wasn’t willing to consponsor for the sake of a glowing New York Times editorial?  Immigration amnesty was just the last straw.  I regret sending him $20.

Mitt Romney does nothing for me.  I don’t care that he’s a Mormon.  I don’t care that he was a Republican governor of the Bay State.  I do care that I know very little about him, and what I do know seems depressingly contradictory.  Pick a story and stay with it, please, Mr. Romney.

And the minor candidates?  They’re minor for a reason.  Not worth mentioning.

That leaves, of course, the Grand Old Elephant in the corner:  Fred Dalton Thompson. 

I remember when Thompson left the Senate.  I thought that he was one of the few members of Congress that I’d enthusiastically support for higher office.  Why?  Because he’s a decent guy. 

Decent — I don’t choose that word lightly.  Thompson seems authentic, even “earthy.”  His response to Michael Moore was absolutely perfect.  His radio commentary and his recent flurry of printed opinion pieces is reminiscent of Reagan’s groundwork during the Carter malaise.  Thompson strikes me as the kind of person who is pragmatic and whose values and outlook are more in sync with America than the Beltway.

In the current National Review, David Frum makes an interesting argument that the GOP needs a strong candidate who responds to the needs of today, just as Reagan responded to the needs of his day.  We do not need a candidate who has lost his bearings, who tries to be a doctrinaire Reaganite or a Rockefeller Republican, for today’s political reality doesn’t favor pure Reaganism or any other named variant of Republicanism.  We do need someone who has a clear vision of the strengths and weaknesses of America in 2007, and has a reasonable program for promoting our strengths while shoring up our weaknesses. 

On balance, Thompson seems to be the most visionary.  He seems to be the only candidate interested in laying out a sustained argument not just for the WHAT of his policy proscriptions, but also for the WHY.  This is a good thing.  We’ve spent far too much time with a deficit of persuasion coming from the hallowed halls of our nation’s capital.

There seems to be a groundswell of support for Fred Thompson.  I hope this continues, and I hope he proves to be the candidate we need.

Politics & Culture

Reflections on the '08 GOP Field

4 Comments

Not too many are happy with the current, official GOP candidates.  Including me.
I was initially thrilled with the Giuliani candidacy; he was, after all, America’s Mayor, and he is tough on terror and tough on crime and tough on bad budgets.  Sure, he’s a bit wobbly on social issues, but that’s the direction the electorate is moving, anyway.  But then Rudy decided to thumb his nose at social conservatives, almost taunting them with his pronouncements on abortion and gay rights.  It’s one thing to support a candidate who doesn’t fully mesh with the base; it’s quite another to stand for a guy who deliberately draws sharp contrasts against the base for the edification of social liberals who aren’t going to vote for him anyway.
I supported John McCain’s early bid; he stood firmly with President Bush on the War on Terror, and he worked hard in the Senate before abdicating to run a full-time campaign.  But how tone-deaf do you have to be to sponsor legislation with Democrats that seems designed to run the GOP into the ground?  McCain-Feingold, McCain-Kennedy — has the gentleman from Arizona ever met a bad policy he wasn’t willing to consponsor for the sake of a glowing New York Times editorial?  Immigration amnesty was just the last straw.  I regret sending him $20.
Mitt Romney does nothing for me.  I don’t care that he’s a Mormon.  I don’t care that he was a Republican governor of the Bay State.  I do care that I know very little about him, and what I do know seems depressingly contradictory.  Pick a story and stay with it, please, Mr. Romney.
And the minor candidates?  They’re minor for a reason.  Not worth mentioning.
That leaves, of course, the Grand Old Elephant in the corner:  Fred Dalton Thompson. 
I remember when Thompson left the Senate.  I thought that he was one of the few members of Congress that I’d enthusiastically support for higher office.  Why?  Because he’s a decent guy. 
Decent — I don’t choose that word lightly.  Thompson seems authentic, even “earthy.”  His response to Michael Moore was absolutely perfect.  His radio commentary and his recent flurry of printed opinion pieces is reminiscent of Reagan’s groundwork during the Carter malaise.  Thompson strikes me as the kind of person who is pragmatic and whose values and outlook are more in sync with America than the Beltway.
In the current National Review, David Frum makes an interesting argument that the GOP needs a strong candidate who responds to the needs of today, just as Reagan responded to the needs of his day.  We do not need a candidate who has lost his bearings, who tries to be a doctrinaire Reaganite or a Rockefeller Republican, for today’s political reality doesn’t favor pure Reaganism or any other named variant of Republicanism.  We do need someone who has a clear vision of the strengths and weaknesses of America in 2007, and has a reasonable program for promoting our strengths while shoring up our weaknesses. 
On balance, Thompson seems to be the most visionary.  He seems to be the only candidate interested in laying out a sustained argument not just for the WHAT of his policy proscriptions, but also for the WHY.  This is a good thing.  We’ve spent far too much time with a deficit of persuasion coming from the hallowed halls of our nation’s capital.
There seems to be a groundswell of support for Fred Thompson.  I hope this continues, and I hope he proves to be the candidate we need.

Personal, Politics & Culture

Fostering Innovation

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My employer has a relatively new program designed to foster innovation throughout all levels of the organization.  The program is fairly straightforward — anyone can attend a half-day session wherein various creative exercises and principles are shared by senior leaders, to help staff learn to think “outside the box.”

Then, any staff member who has the passion to pursue a project is free to attend the second session, which consists of small-group conversations about the ideas developed by participants, followed by a more in-depth review of how the executive team will evaluate and — as appropriate — fund various projects.  The third and final session is a workgroup intended to hammer out a presentation for delivery to the senior executives, including a full project plan and financial pro forma.

The natural cynic within me isn’t enthusiastic about the success of large enterprises “training” staff on dynamic and creative thinking.  Yet, as a participant in the program, I cannot help but be intrigued by the way the system works, and I believe the executives are serious about making the innovation initiative a success.  This leads me to reflect on the nature of innovation per se.

Humans are, by our very biology, pattern-recognition machines.  Our brains are optimized to process sensory input and to categorize it according to previously encountered paradigms.  So, it’s not quite so easy to just decide one day to “think outside the box” — for doing so requires us to think in ways that are contrary to how are brains are designed.

Yet there are some strategies that help, especially when applied methodically to a specific problem.  That’s one reason I do my most productive writing from the coffee shop — without the distractions of home to lead me astray, I can focus on my work, and even occasionally get new ideas simply by observing the people around me.

I am often dismayed by how many otherwise intelligent people are willing to settle for the mundane.  They are content to work a 9-5 job, raise 2.3 kids, live in the suburbs, and drive a used minivan.  Perhaps breaking out of this worldview is more difficult for people than I would have guessed.  The comfort of a familiar life-pattern, especially one that is strongly engrained into our social consciousness, isn’t something people ordinarily wish to buck, so why bother pursuing an interently more risky lifestyle? 

It’s a form of game theory.  There is a basic prudence in choosing a high probability of adequate comfort over a low probabily of high comfort but higher risk of high discomfort.  For many reasons, I’m more inclined to the second path, but even though I continue to reject it, I am more sympathetic to the logic of joining the “herd of individuals.”

Thinking “outside the box” is neither easy nor universally fruitful.  Maybe that’s one reason that truly innovative thinking — in the working world or at home — is so rare.  Perhaps its the reason we fear making tough choices that infringe on our psychological comfort.

In either case, I think I’ll push my project into session three and see what happens.  At worst, I’ve had some face time with the bosses.  At best, I might do something truly remarkable. 

Philosophy, Politics & Culture

Grand Canyon of Philosophy

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Grand Rapids is a fairly conservative place, filled with common-sense Midwest types who don’t take a cotton to extremism of any stripe.  My hometown is, significantly, the home of President Gerald Ford, Sen. Arthur Vandenberg, and Rep. Vern Ehlers — gentle pragmatists, all.

So it’s with equal measures of curiosity and distaste that I witness the anti-war protests occuring routinely in the downtown area. 

West Michigan is not anti-war.  We’re not pro-war, per se, but we support our troops, and even if some (or many) don’t much care for the present enterprise in Iraq, we don’t protest about it.  Of course, every metropolitan area has its wackos and firebrands, yet it’s curious that anti-war protests continue unchallenged by anti-anti-war counter-protests in this fair city.

I think that the response to the conflict in Iraq and the current hysteria over climate change — just two of several warning signs — reflects a major break in American society.  I refer not to the usual suspects of ideology or economics, or of red-versus-blue, but of philosophy.

It is said that those who abandon belief in God lack the philosophical grounding to land anywhere but in a sort of fatalistic relativism, where no truth can be held to be absolute, since any truth-claim lacks an absolute frame of objective reference.

Perhaps that’s true; perhaps it’s not.  But as a working hypothesis, let’s run with it for a moment.

What is the biggest fault line in American civil society?  Not race.  Not language.  Rather, religion.  Those who profess a faith in God (typically the God of Abraham) see the world in much different ways from those who do not.

Pollsters and political scientists chalk up religion as a confounding variable.  Fair enough.  But is there something deeper to it than that?

If one accepts the existence of God, then certain modes of thinking about the world become possible, among them a cosmology that is not human-centric and an ethics that permits absolute value claims.  It is not idle coffeehouse chatter to note that the conclusions of high philosophy, especially in the tradition of the Roman Catholic Church, lead to understandings of man’s place in the world and our duties to each other that conflict with secular philosophy.

Let’s consider two examples.

First, cosmology.  If God exists, and if God created people in His image and likeness, then people — as part of creation — have a duty to respond to the creator.  If God does not exist, then man has no duty to creation, since creation is an accident of chemistry, biology, and quantum mechanics that cannot be considered as the product of a rational and conscious supernatural actor.  It follows, then, that theists see themselves as part of a divinely ordered creation, whose status as “created” implies a subordination to some degree to the will of the creator.  And, that atheists are not compelled by logical necessity to recognize any higher authority than themselves (or, more generally, whatever authority they choose to accept).

Second, ethics.  The theistic duty described above takes its shape in the ethical norms revealed to creation by God, in the form of natural law and the covenants.  If you believe in God, then you believe that God establishes ethical norms that transcend human custom and are not optional.  Atheists, however, are not required to accept natural-law or divine-command moral theories; the can pick from egoism, feminism, deontology, virtue ethics, consequentialism, or anything that tickles their fancy — for the arbiter of what is morally correct lies within the self.

What are the implications?

It seems the major point of contention between theists and atheists is in the degree to which human autonomy should be surrendered to some entity (God, the community, whatever) outside the self.  In general, atheism is self-focused; atheists tend toward egoism and value themselves above all else.  This is not meant in a negative way; there is much merit to considering the self.  But it means that the two strands of thought, quite apart from their theological differences, provide a welcome home to very divergent political ideologies.

We can no longer have a meaningful public discourse about “life” questions — abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide, embryonic stem cell research.  Political battle lines have hardened, shaped by religious attitudes that are all-encompassing.

The question, though, is the degree to which religious or philosophical disagreement will continue to make civil discourse more difficult.  Today, abortion.  What tomorrow?  Just-war theory and evolution have already calcified.  What’s next?  Social justice, perhaps?

Yet for all the underlying power of religion and philosophy to shape our public conversations, so few remain aware of the basic principles of logic, epistemology, cosmology, ethics, theology, and metaphysics.  We are arguing from the watchtowers, but we have forgotten where the footpaths lay.

This is not a good thing, and it doesn’t bode well for a general reconciliation in Western civil society.

Philosophy, Politics & Culture

Reason vs. Vitriol: Which Shall Previal?

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I had an interesting exchange a few days ago in a political discussion group, with a self-identified liberal who took issue with an off-the-cuff characterization I made about “rabid” and irrational Bush-haters.  The context of the conversation was about the nature of the lies and inaccuracies of politicians.

My gentle interlocutor seems a bright enough fellow, with more understanding of the principles of critical reasoning than most I’ve encountered in my online travels.  That credit ascribed, however, he insisted that I had committed an ad hominem, and that a “generous debater” would engage the substance of the argument assuming the best of intent on the part of the other.

Well, OK.  On a technical level, he is right that I dismissed out-of-hand the claims of what I’ll call, for the sake of this entry, the “Rabid Left.”  But it’s not clear that the Rabid Left actually presents an argument of intellectual substance worthy of reasonable engagement.

We all know that there are a number of smart, informed, passionate people who inhabit all parts of the ideological spectrum.  We also know that the spectrum contains people who are, to put it bluntly, dumb as rocks but don’t quite realize it.

Any reasonable person is worthy of civil discourse, conducted in a spirit of good-faith inquiry.  Unreasonable people aren’t, by virtue of their dismissal of sound thinking.

Consider the case of the Rabid Left.  Many of these people hate George W. Bush with passion.  They repeat the same claims as if they’re engaging in heroic truth-tellilng:  Bush is an idiot, Bush is a liar, Bush is a war criminal, Bush is a monkey, Bush is a puppet of the Evil Overlord Dick Cheney.

Do these people provide anything other than vitriol?  Rarely.  When they do defend their points, they often resort to assertions ungrounded in fact (e.g., “Bush lied about WMD”) or based on a most unkind character assassination (e.g., “Bush only attacked Iraq because Saddam tried to kill his daddy”).

How is a reasonable person to respond, short of dismissal?  Debate requires conformance to the basic principles of logic.  Things like the law of non-contradiction, the law of the excluded middle, syllogisms, the principles of valid inference — each of those things, employed in the analysis of objective fact, contribute to a coherent conversation.  A sequence of wild assertions does not.

It is both a strength and a weakness of contemporary liberalism that it remains committed to some sense of process fairness.  A strength, insofar as multiple perspectives are welcomed.  A weakness, insofar as most ideas are considered inherently equal and therefore equally entitled to consideration.  It is this weakness — this tendency to drawing moral equivalence — that has so confused much of the post-9/11 discourse in the West.

I have yet to decide whether I will attempt to rationally engage the Rabid Left in the future, or to just steer them a wide berth.  In the meantime, I can only pray that we move ever closer to a day when reason and not vitriol becomes the trump card in ideological disputes.

Philosophy, Politics & Culture

Saving Lives

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What would you do to save a life?

Would you leap into a burning building to rescue a child?  Jump into the river to grab a man who can’t swim?  Dive on a grenade to save your squad?  Wade into a group of rioters to pull an elderly woman to safety?

We like to think that we would perform these heroic acts — at the least, in service to family or friends.  Many say they’d even do them for strangers.  And a survey of the newspapers suggests that such things happen with heart-warming regularity.

In the language of duty ethics, philosophers call these types of actions supererogatory acts.  That is, they are things done which are morally praiseworthy but not morally required.  We have no duty to expose our own lives to real danger just to attempt the rescue of another; we all applaud the bystander who dives in front of a bus to knock the foreign tourist to safety, but no one seriously suggests that the bystander had an obligation to do so.

But what if you could save a life by doing something trivial?  Would you do it?  Or, more pointedly, would you refuse to do it?

Hospital errors are believed to be the fifth most frequent cause of death in the United States.  We are aware, no doubt, of the horror stories of people having the wrong limb amputated, or the wrong surgery performed.  These things happen, but relatively rarely.  More frequent are medication errors.  It’s been suggested by healthcare quality experts that patients have a 10 percent chance of having prescribed medications fail to be transcribed and administered, and there is upwards of a 25 percent chance that at some point during an inpatient stay, there will be a medication error of some sort for any given patient in any given hospital — most frequently, because the bedside nurse failed to double-check the dosage or to verify the patient’s identity.

Not only that, but people can die from nosocomial infections (infections acquired in a hospital, unrelated to the reason for the patient’s admission).  The single most effective method of preventing nosocomial infections is diligent hand-washing, yet time and again, clinical staff fail to follow the basic universal precautions.  In fact, a physician of my acquaintance counted the number of times he observed hand-washing one day while sitting with his dying father:  Of more than 25 individual encounters, not once did clinical staff wash their hands.

The irony is that many healthcare workers actually would engage in heroic acts to save the life of a stranger, even though most don’t do the routine things that, statistically speaking, would be more effective at saving more lives in the long run.

Of course, the phenomenon is not limited to healthcare; negligence seems to be a universal human trait.  Yet for all the obsessing we do about the value of human life, the cavalier attitude so many of us take to minimizing unnecessary occasions of potential harm is truly distressing.

We may or may not have the fortitude to pull an infant from an auto wreck, but surely we can all wash our hands and fasten our seat belts.  It may not be heroic, but it reduces the need for heroism, which isn’t a bad place to be.

Politics & Culture

Why I Am Not an Environmentalist

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I just finished watching a two-hour special on the History Channel about the top seven things that could cause a catastrophic end to humanity.  The program aired a few weeks ago, but I recorded it and only today felt sufficiently motivated to view it.

For those who are curious, the seven — in ascending order of likelihood — are:

7.  Massive burst of gamma radiation from space, or collision with a traveling black hole,
6.  Asteroid impact,
5.  Death by super-smart computers that decide to exterminate us,
4.  Climate change wrought by supervolcano eruption,
3.  Pandemics (probably based on a human-engineered virus),
2.  Nuclear war,

and in first place …

1.  Human-generated climate change.

The first hour of the program was actually quite interesting, being rooted in science and all.  The tone changed, however, when the gentle viewer arrived at the top three.  There, the hectoring began to displace the science, until we got to the No. 1 position, where the science was altogether absent, replaced by doomsday predictions that “no reasonable person can dispute” carefully explained by Al Gore himself.

Huh?

I am not an environmentalist because I have an innate loathing for activists of any stripe.  I don’t care the cause or the means; I find political activism distasteful.  I even disassociate with people who advocate for positions with which I strongly agree, as on issues including abortion, capital punishment, and euthanasia.  I believe that if something is worth changing, then it’s worth changing by one’s own hand.  Activism merely presents an outlet for moral vanity.

And such vanity is often on display among environmentalists.

You can see it in the frequent ad hominems, as in claiming that there is no “debate” on climate change, only scare tactics funded by Big Oil.  One panelist on the History Channel program even directly equated climate-change “deniers” with Holocaust deniers — with a straight face. 

I will be honest:  I don’t know the nature or extent of climate change.  I don’t know the degree to which humans have any culpability for the change.  All I know is that the arguments I hear don’t persuade me.  It’s not enough to mistake correlation for causation and then demand massive sociopolitical changes based on models that are still wildly inconsistent.  Nor is it enough to show pictures of polar bears and try to appeal to people’s emotions, all while repeating incessantly the nostrums of the environmentalist movement.

Still, there are arguments that can be made that might make me support the ends, if not the means, of environmentalists.  I can see the benefit to reducing the use of fossil fuels, for example. 

But the environmentalists (and all activists, really) turn me off because they take a theory and from it, make very specific claims about policy.  Take climate change as an example.  There is much we don’t understand about why the climate works as it does.  We don’t understand the rhythms with certainty.  Heck, we don’t even know what the weather will be like in 24 hours.  A good and reasonable approach would be to demonstrate climate change, and offer a spectrum of possible explanations for it, a sane assessment of the results of it, and a host of potential methods for mitigating the unpleasant outcomes.  A bad and unreasonable approach would be for “climatologists” and Nobel laureates to band together to demand very specific political acts (like the ratification of Kyoto) as the only appropriate response to the doom that is sure to overwhelm us within a generation.

We do not need Kyoto or Priuses or windmill farms or other such nonsense.  We need, rather, for the scientists to tell us the facts, so that the policymakers (and not the scientists) can determine the correct plan of action.

I fear the only hope for humanity is if I were to build a super-smart computer and program it to kill all the activists.