Louis Menand, one of my favourite writers and the person who most instigated my interest in American studies with his collection of essays of the same name, has a piece in last week's New Yorker, on the effects of texting on English, and on language in general. It is nominally a review of, Northern-Ireland-born, David Crystal's book "Txtng: the Gr8 Db8," but, since it is the New Yorker, it really uses the book as more of a jumping off point into the issue in its own right. I think it's a really nice treatment of the topic but, as an apparently avid texter (I recently had to up my plan to 1000 texts a month) there were a few things that came to mind in response to the article on how we ought to think about texting.
Crystal is a linguist and his book is an attempt to challenge the commonly made assertion that the advent of the texting in the world will lead to the degradation of English. Menand notes Crystal's field and goes on to note that experts in this field "almost universally, do not believe that any naturally occurring changes in the language can be bad." I'm no linguist myself, and I have never even taken a class in the area but I, too, have noticed this tendency--mostly as a result of my frequenting this blog. Menand seems to disagree with this broad notion that language change cannot be bad and I'm generally sympathetic to the idea that we should attempt to retain legitimate value judgments wherever appropriate, but I don't share his mild dismissiveness.
Firstly, we should note that Crystal, according to wikipedia (source of sources), believes that language change can indeed be bad and thus proposes a standard form of the language to ensure mutual intelligibility among speakers with increasingly divergent dialects. This mutes the charge a little by, seemingly, placing Crystal in the class of linguists who are open to the possibility of unhelpful (and we may as well call this bad, or, at least, potentially so) language change in general but who just happens to believe that this particular case of language change is not one of them.
Secondly, it seems like we ought to separate out two kinds of analysis of language change, in a tried-and-tested philosophical move: the descriptive--what it is that is happening--from the normative--what it is that is of value in these events. We might say that, yes, language change as a matter of descriptive fact is indeed taking place but that from a normative perspective we could be silent on the virtues of such a change--the issues are separate. Menand asserts that professional linguists are always of the mindset that no matter the descriptive change in language there can be no negative normative connotation to this. I tend to believe that some changes in language can be negative (or at least sub-optimal) but Crystal here seems to be arguing--and I repeat that I have not read his book--that even on a descriptive level the language change that we can attribute to texting is either negligible or nothing new. Now, it's possible for us to believe that no descriptive change could be associated with a change in normative standing, i.e. we think something ought to change, like the current administration, say, and if it doesn't, we disapprove. But it seems that the case of texting cannot be held to be like this since people, in general, think we should leave the language alone because its current normative standing is just fine, thank you.
There seems to be to a meta-point here to be made about alarmism and anti-alarmism. I have long lamented the fact that people single out historical phenomena as being much more novel or significant than a survey of the past will actually demonstrate. People who make this kind of mistakes strike me as alarmists in that they warn us of a fallen present without noting, or even knowing, that the past was no better and potentially worse--they lack perspective as it were. I suppose I typically take on the role of the anti-alarmist in discussions of this nature in that I propose that a historical analysis of a given situation will mitigate the severity of their alarmism and lead them to conclude that things aren't really as bad as they seem. I certainly play this role, though, of course, amateurishly, as with everything I do, when discussing language change but I don't want to argue, in general, for the notion that there is truly nothing new under the sun. I am willing to call President Bush the worst President in American history and I think that historical perspective here will prove the alarmist case rather than the anti-alarmist one. So, in essence, we are attempting to establish where to sensibly place the burden of proof, or the direction of presumption, in different issues. In general, I think we ought to presume that the present is surprisingly similar to the past and so anytime we think that it's not we should check ourselves. But this doesn't rule out the possibility that sometimes the facts will overcome this presumption and we ultimately end up making an alarmist case--climate change, for example.
Menand makes this interesting historically comparison between texting and morse code with the clever observation that to produce an 's' in morse code takes only three presses of a device (whereas, one presumes, he is implicitly noting that to produce an 's' on a cell phone takes four). Presumably he doesn't mean this objection to be taken seriously since not only is comparing the presses necessary to produce a single character an example of the sin of cherry-picking but with the advent, quite a while ago, of predictive texting even the 's'-argument ceases to hold true. The gesture is supposed to suggest just how absurd texting can seem to be from a particular perspective: a device that affords you the opportunity to use the speediest form of communication available to us--our voices--is instead used to much less efficient ends. This is a common argument that one will hear amongst non- or anti-texters: why don't you just call them?
Now I don't know what the consensus is on what texting was supposed to be for. I can't speak to the origins of texting or to its design purpose but I can speak to how I, and I think people I know, conceive of it as a means of communication. In my experience it has proven to be most useful in providing an avenue for frequent, low-intensity contact between people who have no problem with the intimacy of phone-conversations (as Menand at one point suggests is the real source of technological developments of these kinds) but who are constrained by some factors that prevent calling at given times. So, I don't text instead of calling because I dislike calling in general, indeed I think that calling is superior to texting as a means of actually conducting a conversation, but a large number of our communicative acts aren't intended to engage in the unpredictable back-and-forth of authentic dialogue. They are strictly informative. This trend in online instant messaging, for example, has often been lamented by me because I think that text-based communication can provide a level of intellectual depth that purely voice-based communication does not but it seems perfectly acceptable given the dexterous constraints that the cell phone places on our typing abilities. Some of us may get more used to it than others but it's certainly not a pleasant physical activity.
One of Crystal's arguments is that texting is enjoyable in its own right because we enjoy playing with language and limiting ourselves to 160 characters is, in a sense, comparable to poetic constraints that we might utilise. I think this is an interesting argument and one that I have thought about to some extent, but I suspect that these kinds of constraints simply reduce the complexity of the messages sent rather than retaining complexity but altering its form. Rather I think the constraints that text messaging is concerned with are temporal not syntactical. We text because social conventions and the like forbid us from engaging in the contact we ultimately prefer to engage in.
Yes, some people text because it's less personal, sure but I don't think this captures the sole essence of the matter. We text when we want to communicate something succinct but not engage in a conversation around that information and we text when we want to communicate but are constrained in how we can do so. Menand seems to romanticise the notion of conversation as one that should be engaged in either purely or not at all. Let's say he's right, and I don't think he is, then surely text messages allow us to keep conversation pure by riding it of a whole class of trivial conversations about where people are planning to meet and when. Menand suggests that a trillion text messages sent annually cannot have no effect--presumably because a trillion of anything is too large to have no effect (angels on the head of a pin?)--on the nature of our language and maybe he's right. But I suspect that there's as much chance that texting can improve how we communicate as there is it will damage it. And, after all, isn't English really only a proxy for communication anyway?
Let's not fetishise the descriptive aspect of language change and instead remember the real standard with which a language should be compared: its ability to facilitate information exchange of a variety of types in a variety of fashions. Some trends in language change may be bad, but I don't think this is one of them.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Thursday, October 16, 2008
No improvement in professionalism
So I continue to be as erratic as John McCain in posting to this blog, but I refuse to give up.
I have been writing though over the past two months or so please don't judge me too harshly (bonus: here's the link to my first column I wrote for the CT over the summer but couldn't find--for some reason--the last time I posted). The editorial board position has certainly encouraged me to write on a regular basis and I think that this has, in part, disrupted my blogging. It has enabled me to be regularly published though and, for the most part, without changes being done to my work. One of my editorials did not run, however, for reasons that were never really made clear to me, so I suppose I'll make a blog post out of that too.
A downside that I've encountered is the comments that some of my editorials produce. I've been meaning to write a piece on the typical problem with this, as I see it, though I'm sure to do so on the editorial page would only exacerbate the problem, but haven't yet gotten around to it yet.
In a sense, I feel the problem is related to the kind of difficulty I have with evaluating the back-and-forth that we witnessed, to some extent, in tonight's final Presidential debate and to a lesser extent in the others. When people write comments online they do usually so very uncarefully. And by uncarefully I mean that they write things which are ambiguous as to the logic actually used to derive them and only tangentially related to the argument I actually made. Thus I'm left in the situation of either ignoring them and feeling like a dismissive elitist or having to write a tremendous amount to be sufficiently charitable so that I don't misinterpret their terse text and feeling like I'm wasting my time. I usually opt for the former option because, firstly, I suspect it would be inappropriate to engage the commenters in that forum (no quite sock puppetry, but still) and secondly, it would require another article to really be fair to the commenter, given the way that they commented. To do otherwise would be to assume too much about their logic or about their actual position vis-a-vis my article. Part of me thinks that I should just view their responses as mere replies to the gestalt of my pieces rather than arguments with the details therein. This is frustrating but I don't really see an alternative.
I feel like the Presidential debates are similar. Both candidates, though I honestly, if biasedly, believe that McCain is more guilty of this than Obama, say things that cannot be sensibly rebutted in a convincing fashion given the time constraints. I feel like the commenters do the same. They make assertions rather than arguments and so one can either, ignore which looks cowardly, counter-assert which looks weak or counter-argue which takes time and is actually frowned upon by the moderator in a lot of cases. This shows a failure to respect the norm of conversational reciprocity.
Last night's debate was certainly more confrontational--perhaps solely because it more closely resembled in its design the way people actually talk to each other--but I don't know that it really got to the bottom of anything. The CT editorial board ran an editorial (that I didn't write) lamenting this fact and I feel the same up to a point. However, I feel like debates just cannot cover the amount of ground that the moderator wants to cover while retaining the depth that is necessitated both by objective criteria that demand that we actually investigate matters of this importance to a sufficient degree and by the way they talk to each other. So I'm sure the candidates don't help but the format, even when the format is as different as it was last night, strikes me as being mostly to blame.
Talking to each other about deep issues is surprisingly difficult. One major reason is the conflict between emotions and reasons, but this is unsurprising. Another, more complex, reason is that many debates are over details and if we don't all have the same understanding of those facts then our conversation will stall. Now, ideally we could "look up" the facts and then proceed but we know that this doesn't often happen both because we're seldom so committed to the process so as to protract it this way and because the facts are often murky enough--or, at least, seem so these days--that we can even disagree over them if we were to look them up. I'm not usually so pessimistic but I think conversation and debate both require a discipline that we're not always willing to employ--it doesn't come naturally anymore, if it ever did, and so we'll need to work hard to regain this particular virtue.
I have been writing though over the past two months or so please don't judge me too harshly (bonus: here's the link to my first column I wrote for the CT over the summer but couldn't find--for some reason--the last time I posted). The editorial board position has certainly encouraged me to write on a regular basis and I think that this has, in part, disrupted my blogging. It has enabled me to be regularly published though and, for the most part, without changes being done to my work. One of my editorials did not run, however, for reasons that were never really made clear to me, so I suppose I'll make a blog post out of that too.
A downside that I've encountered is the comments that some of my editorials produce. I've been meaning to write a piece on the typical problem with this, as I see it, though I'm sure to do so on the editorial page would only exacerbate the problem, but haven't yet gotten around to it yet.
In a sense, I feel the problem is related to the kind of difficulty I have with evaluating the back-and-forth that we witnessed, to some extent, in tonight's final Presidential debate and to a lesser extent in the others. When people write comments online they do usually so very uncarefully. And by uncarefully I mean that they write things which are ambiguous as to the logic actually used to derive them and only tangentially related to the argument I actually made. Thus I'm left in the situation of either ignoring them and feeling like a dismissive elitist or having to write a tremendous amount to be sufficiently charitable so that I don't misinterpret their terse text and feeling like I'm wasting my time. I usually opt for the former option because, firstly, I suspect it would be inappropriate to engage the commenters in that forum (no quite sock puppetry, but still) and secondly, it would require another article to really be fair to the commenter, given the way that they commented. To do otherwise would be to assume too much about their logic or about their actual position vis-a-vis my article. Part of me thinks that I should just view their responses as mere replies to the gestalt of my pieces rather than arguments with the details therein. This is frustrating but I don't really see an alternative.
I feel like the Presidential debates are similar. Both candidates, though I honestly, if biasedly, believe that McCain is more guilty of this than Obama, say things that cannot be sensibly rebutted in a convincing fashion given the time constraints. I feel like the commenters do the same. They make assertions rather than arguments and so one can either, ignore which looks cowardly, counter-assert which looks weak or counter-argue which takes time and is actually frowned upon by the moderator in a lot of cases. This shows a failure to respect the norm of conversational reciprocity.
Last night's debate was certainly more confrontational--perhaps solely because it more closely resembled in its design the way people actually talk to each other--but I don't know that it really got to the bottom of anything. The CT editorial board ran an editorial (that I didn't write) lamenting this fact and I feel the same up to a point. However, I feel like debates just cannot cover the amount of ground that the moderator wants to cover while retaining the depth that is necessitated both by objective criteria that demand that we actually investigate matters of this importance to a sufficient degree and by the way they talk to each other. So I'm sure the candidates don't help but the format, even when the format is as different as it was last night, strikes me as being mostly to blame.
Talking to each other about deep issues is surprisingly difficult. One major reason is the conflict between emotions and reasons, but this is unsurprising. Another, more complex, reason is that many debates are over details and if we don't all have the same understanding of those facts then our conversation will stall. Now, ideally we could "look up" the facts and then proceed but we know that this doesn't often happen both because we're seldom so committed to the process so as to protract it this way and because the facts are often murky enough--or, at least, seem so these days--that we can even disagree over them if we were to look them up. I'm not usually so pessimistic but I think conversation and debate both require a discipline that we're not always willing to employ--it doesn't come naturally anymore, if it ever did, and so we'll need to work hard to regain this particular virtue.
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Amateur Dilettante?
So I have found it very difficult to maintain this blog over the past several months. I blame myself, for once, in determining that I would use the space to develop my ideas in a fairly thorough manner which is, of course, time consuming. I will try harder from now on to post regularly, even if it's on incompletely, or insufficiently, thought-out notions.
I have been writing while I've been absent, however. This is the sum total of my editorial endeavours so far, except one piece which I can't currently find online. Comments are always welcome.
My next post will be on this article on the effects of pornography on men. I disagree with it, but hopefully not for pedestrianly familiar reasons. Also, I'm hoping, if I promise to write on something in a blog post then I will feel more of a need to actually follow through on it.
I'm also thinking of doing an editorial on campus activism--inspired by this article--but I haven't developed an angle yet. It's surprisingly difficult to generate even moderately original sensible editorial ideas focusing on the college angle. Maybe I just need to think harder.
The music currently on my iPod has given me another idea: developing a conversation my friend Alan and I have had many times: the exact relationship between Oasis and Blur and how they stand with respect to the canon. Roughly the debate is that I feel like Blur, and especially Albarn, have been more interesting and innovative for longer whereas Oasis, no matter how beloved they are to us, have failed to really stretch themselves. So first the facts must actually be established and then the relevance of them assessed.
Cross your fingers... and toes.
I have been writing while I've been absent, however. This is the sum total of my editorial endeavours so far, except one piece which I can't currently find online. Comments are always welcome.
My next post will be on this article on the effects of pornography on men. I disagree with it, but hopefully not for pedestrianly familiar reasons. Also, I'm hoping, if I promise to write on something in a blog post then I will feel more of a need to actually follow through on it.
I'm also thinking of doing an editorial on campus activism--inspired by this article--but I haven't developed an angle yet. It's surprisingly difficult to generate even moderately original sensible editorial ideas focusing on the college angle. Maybe I just need to think harder.
The music currently on my iPod has given me another idea: developing a conversation my friend Alan and I have had many times: the exact relationship between Oasis and Blur and how they stand with respect to the canon. Roughly the debate is that I feel like Blur, and especially Albarn, have been more interesting and innovative for longer whereas Oasis, no matter how beloved they are to us, have failed to really stretch themselves. So first the facts must actually be established and then the relevance of them assessed.
Cross your fingers... and toes.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
Musings on Obama seduction
I have to admit that when I listened to Barack Obama give this speech, I was profoundly moved. Discussion of prejudice really seems to strike my emotions these days; this also happened quite significantly when I recently saw Doubt which dealt with prejudice against both blacks and gays (among other things). I don't typically place overriding faith in my emotions, as I suppose some people do, but I like to think that I listen to them to at least some extent--moreso now than ever before. And if I listen to my emotions it leads me towards Obama as a candidate and away from Clinton. Now, clearly this is largely a moot point given that I cannot vote in the US (and, indeed, have never voted in my life) but I think it raises issues of to what extent emotions should be a factor in decisions of political support. Really, after all, am I not just being seduced by the rhetoric of Obama's speechwriter, rather than anything substantive?
This worry has some grounds: one really ought to be a cynic. But only if this means understanding that self-interest is one, of many, plausible components of oratory motivation. Making the leap from the banal insight that people can be selfish to the blatant claim that we can therefore never trust a word anyone says just doesn't make sense. The confirmed presence of one aspect of humanity does not entail the absence of its polar opposite at all times. This is the central insight of the amateur proponents of my most disliked political philosophy: libertarianism; they argue that because we can point to instances of individuals acting in a fashion that does not accord with the public good, that no individual can ever be trusted to act out of anything other than self-interest and thus an individual should only ever be charged with handling their own affairs since, otherwise, the potential for abuse is too great.
On this model, Obama is rhapsodising purely as a means to an end: namely, getting elected so he can pursue his own policies. I grant this. Is this a problem? It is only a descriptive difficulty since I would claim that Obama's "own policies" are, at least in part, in the nation's best interests. This seems to lead us to something similar to the Kantian dilemma of duty: how can we ever be sure that a person acted purely out of duty and not out of self-interest other than if they do something that duty requires which singularly hurts their own interests? So, since clearly Obama's interests will not be hurt by his being elected, we must doubt his sincerity. If we are to be cynics, which I said we must, we have to conclude that if an individual benefits from something in any way, then this must have been his/her sole motivation. The probability of self-interest if it is anything other than 0, should be treated as 1.
But this hypothesis is just untestable. We can never be sure, except in the overly exacting Kantian scenario, that self-interest is not the dominant force. All we can do is posit counterfactuals that segregate situations by the degrees of self-interest present, and if an individual has not chosen the maximally self-interested course of action, then we can speculate that he/she was not maximally self-interested. It seems to me that this is the best we can do, since the totalising self-interest assumption leaves us with no way to ever disprove it. At the very least, self-interest as the only plausible human motivation would need to be proven independently as this approach cannot do the job. So Obama's speech seems to me to not be maximally self-interested since he could have just taken the politically expedient route and distanced himself from Wright and declined to dig into the murky depths of racist resentment (on all sides). He didn't do this.
So, we've established that we cannot simply define away all activity as self-interested (for the same reason we cannot explain away all things in the universe with the underdetermined hypothesis "God did it") but that doesn't mean that some more sensitive analysis won't yield the conclusion that some particular acts are indeed self-interested. Again, I don't think that is true of Obama's speech but it might be the case that since Obama didn't write it, our cynicism ought to lead us towards doubting its relevance to his candidacy. Lincoln's oratory was treated as a genuine endorsement of certain attitudes towards politics because they were his own words but perhaps an authenticity gap has emerged in in the era of speechwriters. If this is so then we should never trust our emotional reaction to speeches as they are not even the work of the individual who we are directing our emotions towards.
It is a serious worry these days whether the people who typically run for office are talented in-and-of-themselves or if they are really just the facade on a deeper political operation. When you're not writing your own speeches it contributes to this concern since this worry would be extinguished if this were not the case. But this seems like another example of absolutism masquerading as argument. The classic form is: if we cannot positively discount some claim, then we must assume it obtains. Now, of course, this formulation would generate all kinds of absurd theories if it were actually held in this form so the implicit ad hoc discriminating premise seems to be that of existing prejudice, i.e. this argument is used to shore up my existing beliefs but I don't extend its consistency to challenge beliefs that I hold but that it does not support. Clearly we don't want to romanticise the intellectual as commander-in-chief by insisting on certain credentials for our candidates but, at the very least, the fact that Obama has these qualities should shield him from these charges in a way they might not shield the current President. These concerns are not decisive on their own (few are) but we should still get them straight for what they're worth.
We should all be cynics, but we should also be credulous idealists. This may sound like equivocation but its really just a product of the absence of a word to express the dynamic, responsive balance between the two. Just like we should be emotional and rational; sometimes the relationship is one of alternation based on context (rational then emotional then back again) but more often its a synthetic standard which emphases the interplay between our merely analytically separable traits. This kind of complexity may prohibit us from any unqualified endorsement of a belief, stance or political candidate. But I don't see this as necessarily leading to the dilemma of being forced to choose between the lesser of two (or the least of several) evils. Obama and Clinton might be legitimately difficult to choose between, but that doesn't mean that Obama and McCain are. That some comparisons are tough does not mean all are. We might have difficulty allowing the vulnerable idealism to edge out the safe cynicism on occasion but when we seek balance between opposing forces we will always experience internal resistance.
I cannot completely trust my decisive positive emotional response to Obama, but I can begin to reconcile myself to it since I do not have a decisive negative rational response to him. Perhaps our reasons are but rationalisations of our emotions (and their ilk), but I don't think this is right and until the research settles this decisively, if it ever can, I think it makes more sense to treat reason and emotion as potentially complementary but still distinct faculties. I haven't given myself completely to the Obama campaign, for all kinds of reasons: the most prominent being, doubt as to the extent that his policies absolutely match my own, rather than just comparatively, but I can certainly give myself to his speeches. This may not be everything, but it is something.
And so, on another note, is this guy.
This worry has some grounds: one really ought to be a cynic. But only if this means understanding that self-interest is one, of many, plausible components of oratory motivation. Making the leap from the banal insight that people can be selfish to the blatant claim that we can therefore never trust a word anyone says just doesn't make sense. The confirmed presence of one aspect of humanity does not entail the absence of its polar opposite at all times. This is the central insight of the amateur proponents of my most disliked political philosophy: libertarianism; they argue that because we can point to instances of individuals acting in a fashion that does not accord with the public good, that no individual can ever be trusted to act out of anything other than self-interest and thus an individual should only ever be charged with handling their own affairs since, otherwise, the potential for abuse is too great.
On this model, Obama is rhapsodising purely as a means to an end: namely, getting elected so he can pursue his own policies. I grant this. Is this a problem? It is only a descriptive difficulty since I would claim that Obama's "own policies" are, at least in part, in the nation's best interests. This seems to lead us to something similar to the Kantian dilemma of duty: how can we ever be sure that a person acted purely out of duty and not out of self-interest other than if they do something that duty requires which singularly hurts their own interests? So, since clearly Obama's interests will not be hurt by his being elected, we must doubt his sincerity. If we are to be cynics, which I said we must, we have to conclude that if an individual benefits from something in any way, then this must have been his/her sole motivation. The probability of self-interest if it is anything other than 0, should be treated as 1.
But this hypothesis is just untestable. We can never be sure, except in the overly exacting Kantian scenario, that self-interest is not the dominant force. All we can do is posit counterfactuals that segregate situations by the degrees of self-interest present, and if an individual has not chosen the maximally self-interested course of action, then we can speculate that he/she was not maximally self-interested. It seems to me that this is the best we can do, since the totalising self-interest assumption leaves us with no way to ever disprove it. At the very least, self-interest as the only plausible human motivation would need to be proven independently as this approach cannot do the job. So Obama's speech seems to me to not be maximally self-interested since he could have just taken the politically expedient route and distanced himself from Wright and declined to dig into the murky depths of racist resentment (on all sides). He didn't do this.
So, we've established that we cannot simply define away all activity as self-interested (for the same reason we cannot explain away all things in the universe with the underdetermined hypothesis "God did it") but that doesn't mean that some more sensitive analysis won't yield the conclusion that some particular acts are indeed self-interested. Again, I don't think that is true of Obama's speech but it might be the case that since Obama didn't write it, our cynicism ought to lead us towards doubting its relevance to his candidacy. Lincoln's oratory was treated as a genuine endorsement of certain attitudes towards politics because they were his own words but perhaps an authenticity gap has emerged in in the era of speechwriters. If this is so then we should never trust our emotional reaction to speeches as they are not even the work of the individual who we are directing our emotions towards.
It is a serious worry these days whether the people who typically run for office are talented in-and-of-themselves or if they are really just the facade on a deeper political operation. When you're not writing your own speeches it contributes to this concern since this worry would be extinguished if this were not the case. But this seems like another example of absolutism masquerading as argument. The classic form is: if we cannot positively discount some claim, then we must assume it obtains. Now, of course, this formulation would generate all kinds of absurd theories if it were actually held in this form so the implicit ad hoc discriminating premise seems to be that of existing prejudice, i.e. this argument is used to shore up my existing beliefs but I don't extend its consistency to challenge beliefs that I hold but that it does not support. Clearly we don't want to romanticise the intellectual as commander-in-chief by insisting on certain credentials for our candidates but, at the very least, the fact that Obama has these qualities should shield him from these charges in a way they might not shield the current President. These concerns are not decisive on their own (few are) but we should still get them straight for what they're worth.
We should all be cynics, but we should also be credulous idealists. This may sound like equivocation but its really just a product of the absence of a word to express the dynamic, responsive balance between the two. Just like we should be emotional and rational; sometimes the relationship is one of alternation based on context (rational then emotional then back again) but more often its a synthetic standard which emphases the interplay between our merely analytically separable traits. This kind of complexity may prohibit us from any unqualified endorsement of a belief, stance or political candidate. But I don't see this as necessarily leading to the dilemma of being forced to choose between the lesser of two (or the least of several) evils. Obama and Clinton might be legitimately difficult to choose between, but that doesn't mean that Obama and McCain are. That some comparisons are tough does not mean all are. We might have difficulty allowing the vulnerable idealism to edge out the safe cynicism on occasion but when we seek balance between opposing forces we will always experience internal resistance.
I cannot completely trust my decisive positive emotional response to Obama, but I can begin to reconcile myself to it since I do not have a decisive negative rational response to him. Perhaps our reasons are but rationalisations of our emotions (and their ilk), but I don't think this is right and until the research settles this decisively, if it ever can, I think it makes more sense to treat reason and emotion as potentially complementary but still distinct faculties. I haven't given myself completely to the Obama campaign, for all kinds of reasons: the most prominent being, doubt as to the extent that his policies absolutely match my own, rather than just comparatively, but I can certainly give myself to his speeches. This may not be everything, but it is something.
And so, on another note, is this guy.
Monday, April 7, 2008
Incest may not be best, but it's probably permissible
A friend sent me this story today, and it reminded me of a discussion I got into with my preceptor while taking an undergraduate class at Princeton on "Ethics and Public Policy." The class was co-taught by Professors Philip Pettit (who would later be my thesis advisor) and Stephen Macedo and served as a good academic introduction to a lot of the important issues that still interest me in the field. The class spent a week focusing on the moral and legal status of homosexuality from a philosophical perspective and, somewhat incestuously (and ironically), used Macedo's debate with Robbie George to frame the issue--I was going to link to the relevant articles but they're all behind walls online (I can send them to you if you're interested). In the course of these discussions the topic of incest also came up as a moral norm that we typically see fit to legally enforce. Though I've often equivocated on exactly how liberal Princeton was as a campus, very few students endorsed the view that homosexuality ought to be treated any differently from a moral perspective than heterosexuality is, let alone from a legal perspective. However, the same could not be said of incest. I suppose this won't surprise people, but I think, given the nature of the conversation we were having on the topic, that people should have been more willing to challenge the received opinion on the topic.
[A small aside: the fact that Macedo assigned his own article made me realise, for the first time, that even the most fair minded of professors can potentially fall victim to self-absorption. In fairness, I'm no expert on the literature, and Macedo's essay did receive some acclaim, but it strikes me as odd that he was the first to make these claims in the philosophical community. Including George was also bizarre since he looms so large on campus already, but he, at least, is known as one of the foremost articulators of his system of thought--I don't think that can be said of Macedo, despite my agreeing with him.]
I remember once asking my mother when I was younger why incest was wrong. She replied that sexual abuse was wrong and so, therefore, was incest. I'm not sure how to conceptualise this conflation other than to assume that most examples of incest do fall under the sexual abuse category (which is probably true). However, why would we have a separate name for an offense that we already confidently condemn as wrong?
The above question is rendered moot in cases, like the one featured in the story, where sexual abuse is not obviously taking place. What exactly is thought to be wrong with a relationship between two individuals with such a close genetic relationship? The most often cited issues are mentioned in this piece, among others: social stigma and increased risk of genetic abnormalities. That is, incest should be illegal, firstly, because we wish to spare children conceived in such a manner from the stigma of their peers and, secondly, because we want to avoid conceiving children that have an overly high risk of suffering from genetic abnormalities which lead them to be unhealthy. Let's examine these one at a time.
The social stigma argument seems that it could be approximately circular: incest should be illegal because incest is felt to be morally undesirable by the public at large who will stigmatise those who violate this norm. But surely it is possible (if expressivist theories of law are even partly true) that at least part of this stigma is borne out of the current illegality of the practice. Thus, as a result of this account, all laws of this type must necessarily self-perpetuate, regardless of the independent moral status of the norm being embodied. Once a law has been enacted, the stigma that law creates becomes an independent reason for retaining that law. This cannot be right.
However, let's assume that the stigma is not dependent on the legal status of the norm. Still, it seems like we are unable to support a legal prohibition against incest given the precedents in question. Consider homosexuality again, when it was decriminalised in Britain (well, in England and Wales--Northern Ireland lagged as it always has, though not as much as on the crime (still) of abortion) in 1967, following the findings of the Wolfenden Report, it could hardly be said that homosexuals suffered from an absence of stigma. It's not even clear to me that there is a complete absence of stigma on the topic today (though I am not the type to conclude that if progress has not been satisfactory, it is therefore non-existent), yet we continue to make increased efforts rigorously undermine our prejudices by, for example, equalising the age of consent for homosexual relationships to that of heterosexual relationships. It may be the case that legislatures rely on prior shifts (away from existing stigmas) in public opinion to ensure passage of bills such as these, but the controversial nature of the debates surrounding these parliamentary discussions suggests to me that enacting laws undermines existing social stigma just as much as, if not more than, enacting laws reflect existing social stigma. So, again, it seems those who support prohibitions on incest cannot appeal to this stigmatising worry.
But what of the less malleable role of science in the debate, i.e. the claim that children conceived from an incestuous encounter are intolerably likely to be born suffering from a debilitative genetic disorder? It seems that this provides the strongest case for regulating the sex lives of individuals related to one another in particular ways since it bears on the actual material health of the children which is not suspectible to social change in the way the stigma argument is. No amount of philosophical inquiry will change the facts of the matter here, right?
Yes, in a sense, it is true that there is a clear risk involved in incestuous couplings. The genealogies of European royalty attest to this. But doesn't this have unsettling effects for our thoughts on other relationships if we seek consistency here? Don't we now have to regulate the relationships of any couples who we think are unduly likely to conceive children suffering from such disorders? Much as Macedo argues in his paper Homosexuality and the Conservative Mind (which I didn't link to above), we basically invoke an argument here which stands on its merits in isolation, but not in its proper context. Homosexuality is wrong because it is non-procreative? Then what about sterile couples? Incest is wrong because it may produce "defective" children? Then what about those couples which currently suffer from genetic disorders, are they to be banned from intercourse too? This argument is palpably ad hoc and merely rationalises an existing prejudice.
Yet another point remains to be made against these traditional arguments: namely, incestuous relationships needn't produce children. The claims made above rely on this assumption which seems unnecessary given that plenty of couples are legally permitted to engage in intercourse ,without the intention of conceiving, even if the children that might be produced from such encounters would be "undesirable" as those from incest supposedly are. Clearly, if everyone pursued incestuous encounters this would be problematic, is it would be if everyone pursued homosexual relationships or if everyone became doctors. However, not everyone will do these things so this line of reasoning again seems to mere rationalisation.
So if incest is child abuse, then it is clearly wrong, but why call it incest? And if it's not then it seems that it's no worse than plenty of other "risks" which we have no difficulty with. Perhaps there are stronger arguments out there dealing with the topic, but I'm not familiar with them. It strikes me as merely trying to explain a way a prejudice to respond as we typically do.
[A small aside: the fact that Macedo assigned his own article made me realise, for the first time, that even the most fair minded of professors can potentially fall victim to self-absorption. In fairness, I'm no expert on the literature, and Macedo's essay did receive some acclaim, but it strikes me as odd that he was the first to make these claims in the philosophical community. Including George was also bizarre since he looms so large on campus already, but he, at least, is known as one of the foremost articulators of his system of thought--I don't think that can be said of Macedo, despite my agreeing with him.]
I remember once asking my mother when I was younger why incest was wrong. She replied that sexual abuse was wrong and so, therefore, was incest. I'm not sure how to conceptualise this conflation other than to assume that most examples of incest do fall under the sexual abuse category (which is probably true). However, why would we have a separate name for an offense that we already confidently condemn as wrong?
The above question is rendered moot in cases, like the one featured in the story, where sexual abuse is not obviously taking place. What exactly is thought to be wrong with a relationship between two individuals with such a close genetic relationship? The most often cited issues are mentioned in this piece, among others: social stigma and increased risk of genetic abnormalities. That is, incest should be illegal, firstly, because we wish to spare children conceived in such a manner from the stigma of their peers and, secondly, because we want to avoid conceiving children that have an overly high risk of suffering from genetic abnormalities which lead them to be unhealthy. Let's examine these one at a time.
The social stigma argument seems that it could be approximately circular: incest should be illegal because incest is felt to be morally undesirable by the public at large who will stigmatise those who violate this norm. But surely it is possible (if expressivist theories of law are even partly true) that at least part of this stigma is borne out of the current illegality of the practice. Thus, as a result of this account, all laws of this type must necessarily self-perpetuate, regardless of the independent moral status of the norm being embodied. Once a law has been enacted, the stigma that law creates becomes an independent reason for retaining that law. This cannot be right.
However, let's assume that the stigma is not dependent on the legal status of the norm. Still, it seems like we are unable to support a legal prohibition against incest given the precedents in question. Consider homosexuality again, when it was decriminalised in Britain (well, in England and Wales--Northern Ireland lagged as it always has, though not as much as on the crime (still) of abortion) in 1967, following the findings of the Wolfenden Report, it could hardly be said that homosexuals suffered from an absence of stigma. It's not even clear to me that there is a complete absence of stigma on the topic today (though I am not the type to conclude that if progress has not been satisfactory, it is therefore non-existent), yet we continue to make increased efforts rigorously undermine our prejudices by, for example, equalising the age of consent for homosexual relationships to that of heterosexual relationships. It may be the case that legislatures rely on prior shifts (away from existing stigmas) in public opinion to ensure passage of bills such as these, but the controversial nature of the debates surrounding these parliamentary discussions suggests to me that enacting laws undermines existing social stigma just as much as, if not more than, enacting laws reflect existing social stigma. So, again, it seems those who support prohibitions on incest cannot appeal to this stigmatising worry.
But what of the less malleable role of science in the debate, i.e. the claim that children conceived from an incestuous encounter are intolerably likely to be born suffering from a debilitative genetic disorder? It seems that this provides the strongest case for regulating the sex lives of individuals related to one another in particular ways since it bears on the actual material health of the children which is not suspectible to social change in the way the stigma argument is. No amount of philosophical inquiry will change the facts of the matter here, right?
Yes, in a sense, it is true that there is a clear risk involved in incestuous couplings. The genealogies of European royalty attest to this. But doesn't this have unsettling effects for our thoughts on other relationships if we seek consistency here? Don't we now have to regulate the relationships of any couples who we think are unduly likely to conceive children suffering from such disorders? Much as Macedo argues in his paper Homosexuality and the Conservative Mind (which I didn't link to above), we basically invoke an argument here which stands on its merits in isolation, but not in its proper context. Homosexuality is wrong because it is non-procreative? Then what about sterile couples? Incest is wrong because it may produce "defective" children? Then what about those couples which currently suffer from genetic disorders, are they to be banned from intercourse too? This argument is palpably ad hoc and merely rationalises an existing prejudice.
Yet another point remains to be made against these traditional arguments: namely, incestuous relationships needn't produce children. The claims made above rely on this assumption which seems unnecessary given that plenty of couples are legally permitted to engage in intercourse ,without the intention of conceiving, even if the children that might be produced from such encounters would be "undesirable" as those from incest supposedly are. Clearly, if everyone pursued incestuous encounters this would be problematic, is it would be if everyone pursued homosexual relationships or if everyone became doctors. However, not everyone will do these things so this line of reasoning again seems to mere rationalisation.
So if incest is child abuse, then it is clearly wrong, but why call it incest? And if it's not then it seems that it's no worse than plenty of other "risks" which we have no difficulty with. Perhaps there are stronger arguments out there dealing with the topic, but I'm not familiar with them. It strikes me as merely trying to explain a way a prejudice to respond as we typically do.
Friday, March 21, 2008
I hate people who hate Wikipedia... and presumption
So I just read this piece on one of my favourite blogs and I have to say it rings extremely true to me (not just because it's based out of Philly, though its being on the Penn webspace ought to inspire rivyalry right?). I am always frustrated when I encounter facilely derogatory comments about this wonderful compendium of knowledge.
Basically the (admittedly brief) comment in the original article that this blogpost responds to chastises wiki for having a longer article on Klingon than on Latin. I suppose this is a slightly more subtle complaint about the site than that it's factually unreliable (also a bad argument) but I think it fails nevertheless.
If one subscribes to the view that wikipedia benefits from the wisdom of the crowd, then perhaps Klingon simply warrants a longer entry. To dispute this is to court elitism which, while not always bad, I think should be seen as presumptively so. Anti-elitism is a good use of presumption, by my lights. Wikipedia is a thoroughly anti-elitist enterprise and most of its user revel in this fact (setting aside the issue of whether wiki is worse on elitist topics than serious encyclopedias, it is infinitely better on matters that fall below this level of scrutiny, i.e. the vast majority of things that people are interested in).
Perhaps the argument is derivative on the idea (contrary to the suggestion in the previous paragraph) that wikipedia is less of a democracy and more of an oligarchy? I guess the argument here would be something like: Sure, I'd concede that Klingon matters more (in some sense) than Latin if article length really communicated the preferences of the public at large, but it doesn't. In fact, article length communicates the editorial preferences of the individuals who manage the site (the oligarchs in the analogy above) and these individuals are unrepentant nerds who lack the requisite intellectual perspective to properly police their project's scope.
Assuming one only cares about elitist topics, i.e. those that fall by the wayside under the rubric of crowd wisdom, then why is it problematic that there exists an unduly long article on a topic of no relevance to one's elitist interests? Perhaps the thought is that if wikipedia doesn't have its priorities straight (where priorities here are demonstrated by making article length proportional to importance, of some kind) then we can use this fact as reason to presumptively discredit the entire enterprise. Thus there's no need to read the wiki on Latin: we can safely conclude from the existence of a longer article on Klingon that it's not worthy of our time. This strikes me as a terrible presumption. Why would the quality of one article have any impact upon the quality of another? Let alone why would the mere existence of one article have any impact on the quality of any other?
Don't get me wrong, I frequently lament that the individuals in the world most technically capable of disseminating information often lack the taste to critically assess which information to privilege (.avis of BBC documentaries) and which not to (anime .avis). But this is a (silly) lament about the existence of people who I feel have inferior taste and a (less silly) plea for better content on the interweb. But the existence of anime pushers doesn't inhibit my access to BBC documentaries; the absence of documentary pushers does that independently. Therefore, the only reason we have to suspect that wikipedia's Latin article is inferior is the belief that there are no intellectuals/academics writing anything for it. And this just isn't true.
I'm not arguing for the eclipse of all other encyclopedias or even that wiki be considered a serious source for academic papers (though I tend to think it should have some place in the academic world, as long as it is regulated by professors). I'm not arguing against any traditionally reliable source of knowledge at all. I'm merely arguing that wikipedia not only filled and continues to fill a massive hole in the encyclopedic landscape as it stands and that to view its diversity (in any sense of the word) as a weakness is to court the worst kind of elitism.
Update: Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty funny
Basically the (admittedly brief) comment in the original article that this blogpost responds to chastises wiki for having a longer article on Klingon than on Latin. I suppose this is a slightly more subtle complaint about the site than that it's factually unreliable (also a bad argument) but I think it fails nevertheless.
If one subscribes to the view that wikipedia benefits from the wisdom of the crowd, then perhaps Klingon simply warrants a longer entry. To dispute this is to court elitism which, while not always bad, I think should be seen as presumptively so. Anti-elitism is a good use of presumption, by my lights. Wikipedia is a thoroughly anti-elitist enterprise and most of its user revel in this fact (setting aside the issue of whether wiki is worse on elitist topics than serious encyclopedias, it is infinitely better on matters that fall below this level of scrutiny, i.e. the vast majority of things that people are interested in).
Perhaps the argument is derivative on the idea (contrary to the suggestion in the previous paragraph) that wikipedia is less of a democracy and more of an oligarchy? I guess the argument here would be something like: Sure, I'd concede that Klingon matters more (in some sense) than Latin if article length really communicated the preferences of the public at large, but it doesn't. In fact, article length communicates the editorial preferences of the individuals who manage the site (the oligarchs in the analogy above) and these individuals are unrepentant nerds who lack the requisite intellectual perspective to properly police their project's scope.
Assuming one only cares about elitist topics, i.e. those that fall by the wayside under the rubric of crowd wisdom, then why is it problematic that there exists an unduly long article on a topic of no relevance to one's elitist interests? Perhaps the thought is that if wikipedia doesn't have its priorities straight (where priorities here are demonstrated by making article length proportional to importance, of some kind) then we can use this fact as reason to presumptively discredit the entire enterprise. Thus there's no need to read the wiki on Latin: we can safely conclude from the existence of a longer article on Klingon that it's not worthy of our time. This strikes me as a terrible presumption. Why would the quality of one article have any impact upon the quality of another? Let alone why would the mere existence of one article have any impact on the quality of any other?
Don't get me wrong, I frequently lament that the individuals in the world most technically capable of disseminating information often lack the taste to critically assess which information to privilege (.avis of BBC documentaries) and which not to (anime .avis). But this is a (silly) lament about the existence of people who I feel have inferior taste and a (less silly) plea for better content on the interweb. But the existence of anime pushers doesn't inhibit my access to BBC documentaries; the absence of documentary pushers does that independently. Therefore, the only reason we have to suspect that wikipedia's Latin article is inferior is the belief that there are no intellectuals/academics writing anything for it. And this just isn't true.
I'm not arguing for the eclipse of all other encyclopedias or even that wiki be considered a serious source for academic papers (though I tend to think it should have some place in the academic world, as long as it is regulated by professors). I'm not arguing against any traditionally reliable source of knowledge at all. I'm merely arguing that wikipedia not only filled and continues to fill a massive hole in the encyclopedic landscape as it stands and that to view its diversity (in any sense of the word) as a weakness is to court the worst kind of elitism.
Update: Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty funny
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Unoriginal Blog Names
I will soon write a post on why I think the scriptural notion that there's nothing new under the sun is mistaken (in a non-trivial way, honest) but for now that thesis has suffered a startling setback. Apparently there's another blog out there with the same title as this nascent one--though it seems that it (like 9 out of 10 blogs) has failed in its first year. Now, I didn't deliberate for an extended period of time on the title but I figured it was original enough to stand a chance at getting a unique url. Not so. Still, despite this ironic turn of events, I think my thesis can be salvaged, but that's for another time. Maybe I should have gone for UnProfessional Dilettante (...peel the onion). Is it too late to stop now?
I'd just like to lament the fact that I've had to abandon at least three hyperlink ideas in the above paragraph because youtube has let me down.
I'd just like to lament the fact that I've had to abandon at least three hyperlink ideas in the above paragraph because youtube has let me down.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)