On Being Normal

Today, any claims that something is normal or abnormal are bound to be met with suspicion or outright hostility. Under the influence of Nietzsche and Marx and their postmodern/poststructuralist descendents, such claims will immediately be interpreted as attempts by some group to exert power over some other group. The cry “normal by whose standards?” will be raised, and, truthfully an answer to this question has been hard to come by. Ever since Hume argued for the fact/value distinction the claim that there are objective standards or norms has been problematic. If the universe is just full of brute facts about the interactions of energy and this is value-free, these interactions are not good or bad, they just are.

The success of atomism and Newtonian physics had swept away the teleological approach of understanding nature which had dominated since Aristotle. The movement of objects could now be explained by natural forces and laws without having to refer to ends or final causes at all. As Hume wrote: “all causes are of the same kind, and that in particular there is no foundation for that distinction, which we sometimes make betwixt efficient causes, and causes sine qua non; or betwixt efficient causes, and formal, and material, and exemplary, and final causes.”[1]
In such a value-free universe any claims of normativity became interpreted as subjective expressions of preference without any objective standards of truth. Anyone making such a claim must be merely trying to trick or force others to adopt a standard, one that might not be to the benefit of the adoptee.

I think that an account of objective standards of normalcy is now possible. The key lies in the recent revival of teleology in philosophy. As I have discussed here before, teleology revolves around the claim that some things have a natural end, aka a telos, or “final cause.” The end of the heart for example is to see to it that the body receives the nutrients contained in the blood. Where something has an end, it also has a function; it’s function being to produce its end. So again, the function of the heart is to pump blood so that it may fulfill its end of providing nutrients to the body. In the modern understanding, the possession of a function is the matter of having a certain history. See my post “Teleology and the Death of Liberalism” for more details.

For each item that possesses a function in this sense there will be an explanation of how the item has historically managed to perform this function. This explanation will mention how the structure of the item in question has managed to “do its job” historically, what conditions were in effect, what the environment was like that allowed the item to successfully perform it function. Millikan calls such an explanation a “normal” explanation and the conditions that have historically held in order for the item to succeed in performing its function “normal” conditions (1984: 33). “Normal” here is a technical term and it is crucial that it should not be thought that normal conditions in this sense are average or frequent the way “normal” often has as a connotation.[2] For example, just think of how few sperm manage to perform their function of fertilizing an egg, or how infrequently the skull needs to perform its function of protecting the brain from impacts. It might be helpful to think of normal conditions as “activation conditions” or “enabling conditions.” In abnormal conditions an item will fail to perform its function, or at least fail to accomplish it in accordance with a normal explanation. Diseased hearts are in abnormal conditions, being underwater for extended periods is an abnormal condition for otherwise healthy lungs, and whatever it is that prevents a specific sperm from fertilizing an egg is also an abnormal condition.

Our current topic, normalcy, I argue, just is the presence of normal conditions for the performance of a function. For example, it is a fact that a diseased or malformed heart is abnormal. This is not subjective, or a matter of opinion, or an expression of personal preference, it is a fact. This heart can not perform its function; it is an objective fact that it is abnormal. These are standards of normalcy that are objective; claims of normalcy can be true or false, and people can be right or wrong about whether something is normal or abnormal. These claims are not mere efforts to “enforce values” on people. It is false to claim that certain things are normal which are not.

To take one example, there is some debate around those who are, say, deaf or disabled. Some of the more radical advocates refuse to say that those who are so affected are in any way abnormal, that they are “differently abled” and only abnormal from the standards of those who retain the use of their legs or ears. But on the current understanding we can see that the legs or auditory systems in these cases have natural functions, and that in the case of the deaf or disabled these systems are in abnormal condition. This does not entail any moral conclusions! It is still open to moral debate how those in abnormal conditions should be treated, and I would advocate great charity and efforts in order that those so afflicted to lead fulfilling lives and to be able to reach their greatest potential. But it is true that normalcy, in the sense that we are using the term, is a fact of the matter, and claims of normalcy for things that are abnormal are simply false.

This might be somewhat uncontroversial. The notion of normal biological functioning has only been questioned by the most radical poststructuralists. It becomes more difficult when we start to move into the realm of abnormal human behavior. If the function of sexual attraction is the production of offspring, then homosexuality would be abnormal. On the other hand, homosexuality might be like sickle cell anemia which some believe exists because it provides immunity to malaria. These conclusions would rely on a better understanding than we currently possess of the mechanism by which sexual attraction is determined. In other cases, behavior might be the result of abnormal psychological processing. For example, any behavior wherein one harms oneself will most likely be abnormal. Self-destructive behavior of a person suffering from schizophrenia is abnormal, but so probably is anorexia and other self-destructive behaviors, although the causes of these are still mysterious.

In some cases two or more individuals have a common purpose the achievement of which depends crucially on each party reproducing their part in a pattern of behavior. This serves to coordinate each one to the other in order to cooperate in the achievement of this common purpose. One such case are the reproduced patterns involved in certain animal mating dances where both the performer of the dance and its audience have a common purpose and have come up with a conventional form in order to coordinate with one another in order to reach it. The intended audience “expects” a dance of a certain form to be performed, its conventions followed, and the performer expects the audience to react in a standard way to its performance. Because the intended audience often enough responds to the dances in a way that benefits them, actors are encouraged to keep producing the dance form. And because responding to the dances aids perceivers, they are encouraged to keep responding in the standard way. Despite the fact that often the dance may fail in its purpose, it is more likely to succeed than some random motions, and that makes it worthwhile to keep it in use.

For example, drivers have a common interest in avoiding collisions, so, in the United States and many other countries, a convention was instituted whereby drivers drive on the right hand side of the road. In order for their common interest to be achieved, both parties must play their part. Drivers thus coordinate with one another in order to cooperate in the achievement of their common goal. Producing and maintaining this mutual adaptation whereby each party contributes to the shared goal is the “stabilizing” function of the item or behavior; it is what keeps both parties to the coordination responding in standard ways (1984: 31, 2005: 54).

As in the biological examples, these human conventions have a function. It just is normal to drive on the right in the United States. Although this is a matter of convention, it does not make the possession of the function and its normal conditions any less objective. Those who drive on the left are behaving abnormally (and ridiculously dangerously). And again, this is a fact, not an attempt to manipulate people against their best interests. It is the nature of the conventions that enable stabilizing functions that they be in the interest of both parties, otherwise there would be no reason for one or both of the parties to continue to reproduce the conventions. I do however think that what might have been in a party’s interest at one time might no longer be in their interest at a later time at which point they will usually stop performing their part of the coordination.

Language has its proper functions as well. It is normal for English speakers to use the term “dog” to refer to dogs. That is why “dog” has been replicated again and again by English speakers; that is its function. Using “dog” in some other way is abnormal.[3] And of course the same goes for all other words. Linguistic moods have their functions as well. It is the function of the indicative mood to produce true beliefs in one’s listeners. That is why people continue to use the indicative mood to communicate with one another. If listeners were too frequently caused to have false beliefs by responding to what is told to them by the use of the indicative mood, they would soon stop forming beliefs based on what was said. Thus lying, the production of false beliefs by means of the indicative mood, is abnormal.

Standards of attire are another case of coordinating conventions. In schools, workplaces, neighborhoods, and any other group or sub-group you will find a high degree of coordination of appearance. The way new styles of attire are selected and reproduced and thus spread through a population are extremely complex and varied, yet enough can be said here to make the point. One benefit of this coordination is that individuals are thereby able to blend in with one another in order to not attract unwanted attention. (On the other hand, there are those who take advantage of the coordinating conventions and intentionally violate them specifically in order to stand out and attract attention.) Another reason for adopting these conventions is the same for having spoken language: people are capable of communicating things about themselves by their choice of attire. We are in on these conventions just as much as they are in on the co-adaptations involved in sharing a spoken language.

Violating the conventions of dress is abnormal. Wearing a headscarf to convey modesty is abnormal in some places but normal in others. Of course, it can become normal if people begin to imitate the new style for some reason and the fashion begins to spread.

Being normal has benefits that being abnormal lacks. Have normally functioning biological organs and behavior of course has its benefits. Likewise, adopting the stabilizing functions of society, such as driving on the right hand side of the road, or writing signs in a common language that can be understood, benefits all in the successful performance of their functions. Telling the truth benefits both the speaker and the listener. True, lying might benefit one in certain circumstances, but the presence of linguistic conventions whereby one can be understood and acquire new information benefits all. Being abnormal might benefit one in certain circumstances. Violating the conventions of attire, for example, might benefit one if they are trying to attract attention, such as pop musicians constantly do. But this is parasitic as it requires the presence of conventions in order that they may be broken. If there were no conventions then these individuals could not attract attention by violating them, or liars would not be trusted.

It is common among some, mostly those in the counterculture, to criticize being normal as being conformist. The reasons for this view go back to existentialism where it was thought that the adoption of any value that one did not create oneself is somehow being inauthentic. It however was not seen how these conventions served functions and bestowed benefits by being able to coordinate and thus communicate things with one another, and cooperate towards shared goals. Members of the counterculture realize this on some level as subcultures coordinate their styles in order to communicate things, such as their group membership and possession of the values of that subculture, by the intentional adoption of contrasting styles. It is abnormal for a goth or hippy or punk or rapper to wear a business suit in their respective groups. But again these styles just become conventions of their own and are adopted for their communicative function; they are their own kind of conformity. There is no real individuality here, just the adoption of other conventions. Individual creativity always occurs from within a tradition, it occurs whereby one is able to perceive a fault or weakness of a tradition and introduce a remedy, and thereby have this remedy spread through a population because of its superiority. This is a kind of non-conformity, but not what the existentialists had in mind.


[1] Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book 1, section XIV.
[2] In Millikan (1984) she capitalized “Normal” to make this difference clear and recently has been calling Normal conditions “historically enabling” conditions (2000: 62) and Normal explanations “normal mechanisms” (2004: 85).
[3] Using “dog” as a metaphor or slang might have a “derived” function. See Language, Though, and Other Biological Categories for details.

Alienation and Diversity

In the light of the tragedy at Fort Hood, reports have come forward of how the gunman felt alienated from the rest of the military because of his Islamic faith. Calls have come forward for the military to put greater emphasis on diversity in the future. For example, General Casey, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has said:

"Our diversity, not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that's worse," Casey added on NBC's Meet the Press. http://www.reuters.com/article/latestCrisis/idUSN08232239

The purpose of this post is to explain the nature of alienation, its causes, and posible ways of removing it. I can't explain why someone might commit atrocities, but I think I have something to offer as regards the relationship between diversity and alienation, and whether increasing diversity is a way to reduce alienation. The place to start is the place I always start here, by adopting the teleological standpoint and asking what a thing’s function is. Often, two or more items have an interest in common that requires coordination between them in order for this common interest to be achieved. When the reason something is reproduced is because it coordinates the parties in this way, it has what is called a stabilizing function.(1) For example, we use the sound “dog” to alert others about the presence of dogs, or to communicate information about dogs. English speakers are adapted to each other to react to “dog” in this way. Because both the speaker and listener (producer/consumer) have a common interest in being able to communicate concerning dogs, the word “dog” will continue to be used to this end, it will continue to be reproduced over and over again as long as it serves this function.(3) Additional examples are the way drivers coordinate with one another by driving on the right, or by standing at a conventional distance from one another when conversing, or the way regional accents serve to coordinate how words are to be pronounced.

In all these cases the coordination is achieved by first arriving at a convention that is to be used again and again to perform this function. There is no reason the sound associated with “dog” is used to refer to dogs, any other sound could have worked equally well, but somehow “dog” was used and because of this precedent this was the sound that was replicated for this use instead of some other. In the case of the need for drivers to coordinate with one another in order to avoid collisions, in America it was the right side of the road that was the chosen convention. Driving on the left could have served equally well, as it does in other countries, but in America driving on the right was chosen as the convention. In all of these cases, the reason the item in question is replicated over and over as it spreads through a population is the weight of precedence, not some inherently superior ability to achieve its end. When you learn a convention you are joining this history, becoming a part of the tradition of using these signs and behaviors.(4) In other words, the possession of a function is a matter of history.

We come now to the topic of our discussion. Alienation, as I am using the term here, is the recognition that one does not stand in a historical relation that another does. Not possessing the language that is in use is one clear example. Polish immigrants in England feel alienated when they are cognizant of the fact that they stand in a different relationship to England than the indigenous population does. Or, for another example, being a non-Christian while visiting a Christmas festival is alienating in this sense. It can still be a wonderful experience, but when one recognizes that you do not possess a historical relation others do, there is a degree of alienation. Another such case is recognizing that you are outside the historical relation of a coordinating convention, and thus are unable to enjoy the benefit that the coordination bestows. It is in part the recognition that there is a sign or behavior being produced for which you are not adapted, or can not enjoy in the benefits of co-adaptation, or that you are producing a sign or behavior and your audience is not adapted to it, and that the stabilizing function is thus failing. To take one example, being in the presence of those who speak a language you do not understand is an alienating experience. They are producing signs to others who are adapted to appreciate them, but you are outside the Normal producer/consumer roles and so unable to share in the benefits of communication. Looked at from the producer side, speaking to one who is not adapted to your language is alienating as well. I would speculate that the feeling of alienation itself has the function of indicating to us that we bear this different relation and are thus not co-adapted to the present circumstances so that we might thereby come to adapt, or seek out those with whom we are co-adapted in order to procure the benefits that coordination and cooperation bestow.

As I mentioned, regional accents serve stabilizing a function of allowing individuals to recognize when the same word is encountered again. Simply not possessing the accent that is used in a region is alienating. One feels that you are the “odd man out.” What usually happens is that people who move to a new region come to adopt the local accent as a means of coordinating with those with whom one must communicate and thus remove the alienation. Another example is how different cultures have different conventions for the proper distance to stand from one another when conversing. Having someone stand closer or further away than you are accustomed to when having a conversation produces that awkward uncomfortable feeling which results from alienation. Offering to shake hands when your consumer is prepared for a bow produces a similar awkward situation. A very important example is the case of different moral standards. Being around those behaving in ways that one deems immoral but others find perfectly acceptable is a very alienating experience.

A very interesting case is the way that people coordinate their appearance. In any workplace, or neighborhood, or culture (or subculture) you are inevitably going to find a high degree of coordination of appearance. Why people coordinate in this way is very interesting, and it appears to be a cultural universal that people do so coordinate. Different cultures have their conventional attire. I am sitting in an airport as I write this and the level or coordination of attire of the people around me is astounding. Everyone is wearing the standard American shoes, pants, shirt, etc.. Of course there is much variety, but the standardization is far more prevalent: there are no samurai warriors, Dutch wooden shoes, Native-American head-dresses, or the like. Attire in a sense forms its own language as people choose certain attire because of what it “says” about them. We are all in on this language just as much as we are all in on the coordinations involved in speaking English. We know that dressing certain ways will say certain things about us. If someone wore a tuxedo to a football game because they were not aware of the conventions it would be an awkward and alienating experience as they became aware of the mis-coordination. Likewise, someone wearing attire from one historical tradition among those of another tradition is going to produce alienation. The controversy over the Muslim headscarf is such an example. In its language the headscarf means modesty, but being produced in Western cultures produces alienation among both wearer and perceiver as it indicates that one is not historically related to it in the way intended, and the failure to coordinate in its meaning occurs.

I believe that there are many reasons and benefits for coordinating appearance in such a way, not just one. But one reason is that people often simply do not want to draw attention to themselves and just want to blend in. By adopting conventions people are assured that they will not attract unwanted attention. Another reason for adopting these conventions is the same for having spoken language; people are capable of communicating things about themselves by their choice of clothing. You can communicate wealth, or sophistication, or various sexual, or even political or social views, or group membership by choice of attire.

Of course, often people do want to draw attention to themselves and so intentionally violate the conventions. Someone might choose to wear a tuxedo to a football game as a joke, to intentionally draw attention to themselves by breaking a convention. In this way new styles and fads are ever being selected and spread throughout the population as people find new ways to draw attention, or say that they are unique. (This is especially true among young people looking to attract the attention of the opposite sex by standing out from the herd. This, I believe, is one of the reasons why the styles of young people change at blinding speed and new fads are constantly adopted while older folks are not involved in this game to this extent.) On the other hand, people, and especially young people, are under intense pressure to adopt the current conventions so as to not stand out, and to adopt the current fashions so as to not seem “uncool,” that is, outside the current language.

Self-alienation is perhaps the most damaging of all. It is the awareness that the conventions one displays are not the conventions of ones own historical tradition. I am thinking of the case of Native Americans who were forced to abandon their conventions of attire and other social conventions and adopt the dominant American styles, or abandon their languages and adopt English, etc. Perhaps it is the fact that these were forced on a people rather than being freely adopted by choice that causes self-alienation.

With this framework in mind we can come to understand the ways that alienation may be removed. It is common these days to misinterpret alienation for intolerance. Perhaps it is the legacy of utilitarianism that sees any feeling of discomfort as a moral evil, and perhaps it is the legacy of Kantianism to believe that moral evils can be avoided by an act of will, and perhaps it is the legacy of existentialism that sees adopting conventions as “inauthentic.” And so as a result, the conclusion is reached that if there are those who feel alienated there must be those who are immorally making them feel alienated. This is the liberal account of the nature of alienation. Their solution is to be “inclusive” and to embrace diversity, to refuse to promote any standards, to emphasize how wonderful is each individual’s self-expression. But looked at from the teleological view one can see why it is doomed to fail. Alienation can only be removed by coming to stand in the same historical relations as others do. One such example would be to successfully coordinate with one another, by learning a common language and thus adapting to one another. Standards will always be adopted for the same reason that standards for language are adopted; coordination is necessary in order to achieve the end and benefits of the stabilizing function. Fostering diversity of language, culture, conventions, customs, and morals will simply serve to increase miscoordination and failure of cooperation. No amount of celebrating diversity can overcome this brute fact: the greater diversity the greater the extent of alienation.

There are cases where individuals are unable to coordinate their appearance with others no matter how virtuous we may be. Those who are tragically disfigured, for example, feel the alienation of being unable to coordinate and “blend in” with others. The alienation minority racial groups express is another case of where people are unable to coordinate appearances or otherwise historically co-adapt. In ones race you wear your history on your sleeve, as it were. And since alienation is the result of recognizing that one stands in a different historical relation than another, race is a constant reminder of these often sad historical differences, one that can not be overcome by co-adaptation as in the case of coming to possess a common language. The Left, is becoming the alienation party, where all its constituent groups have in common is alienation. Liberals believe that the way to remove alienation is for others to be welcoming, non-judgmental, and kind. All of these things are morally important ways to act, but they do not remove that feeling of alienation that exists--as the persistent problems of racial alienation despite decades of effort attest--although they do make the best of the alienating situation and at least do not add to the problems of the individual. No matter how welcoming someone is, a woman wearing a hajib is likely to feel alienation among non-Muslims as they are cognizant of the historical differences and the failure of coordination of meaning.

The result is what we do see, that different racial groups, cultural groups, linguistic groups, and so on congregate together because they are thus able to remove the alienation of being unable to coordinate with others, and so come to enjoy the benefits of coordination. But this should not be interpreted as a moral evil. Those feeling the alienation should not interpret it as liberals do as a sign of irrational intolerance, or irrational prejudice, or irrational discrimination. Intolerance, prejudice, and discrimination without a doubt do exist, and they can make alienation far more acute, but they are not the root cause of alienation, which is diversity.

(1) Ruth Millikan, Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories, ch 1 - 2.
(2) -----,"Biosemantics," in White Queen Psychology and Other Essays For Alice.
(3) -----, Language: A Biological Model, p. 57.
(4) -----, "Language Conventions Made Simple," in Language: A Biological Model.

Convention, Coordination, Cooperation Vs. Diversity, Tolerance, Authenticity

Social interaction and communication proceeds by virtue of the three Cs: convention, coordination, cooperation. That is to say, when two or more things have a common interest they come up with a convention in order to coordinate with one another in order to cooperate towards the goal. For example, when danger is near, beavers slap their tails on the water to alert other beavers of the danger. Each individual beaver has an interest in common with the other beavers in being alerted to danger. Beavers have thus come up with a convention, the tail slap, in order to coordinate with one another, in order to cooperate towards the shared interest of avoiding danger. Or take human language, for another example. It is a convention in English speaking cultures to use the sound "dog" to refer to dogs. People have come up with this convention so that everyone is on the same page, i.e., coordination. In this way we can cooperate when we need to draw each others attention to dogs, or to spread information about dogs. The same goes for other societal conventions: driving on the right, shaking hands when greeting rather than bowing, the use of a regional accent, standards for dress and behavior, etc.. These are all conventions--they could have been taken a different form, one convention is not better than another—but by coming up with a standard for everyone to share it allows for cooperation. Conventions replicate and spread through populations to the extent they solve these coordination problems. [1] When various conventions coalesce the result is a distinctive culture.

Against the three Cs are arrayed the multicultural values of diversity, authenticity, and tolerance. Some believe that these latter three are compatible with interpersonal cooperation. But imagine the example of two individuals who speak a different language trying to discuss dogs. Obviously they would be unable to do so and cooperation would fail. A solution would be for individual A to learn and adopt the language of individual B. Doing so would be to follow the the Cs by agreeing upon a convention to allow coordination and thus cooperation. But in doing so person A would be abandoning their own culture and so surrendering their authenticity. What’s more, diversity would be lost in that one of the languages would cease being used. Conversely, person A could try to get person B to adopt their language. But in so doing they would abandon the value of tolerance and again diversity is lessened. In all cases it seems that the solution to cooperation is to reduce diversity and adopt standard conventions. It is either that or give up the idea of being able to cooperate.

Cultural diversity is a problem in that to the extent that other cultural conventions are practiced they thereby disrupt the existing coordinations and make cooperation difficult. That is, if someone uses a different sound to refer to dogs you are not going to be able to cooperate as easily when it comes to dealing with dogs. And just think about what would happen if cultural diversity was allowed to flourish to the extent that people could retain their conventions on which side of the road to drive!

Generally what we see in such cases is that people will either re-co-adapt by learning the new conventions, or do what is easier and simply congregate with those that they are already co-adapted in this way and thus retain their authenticity. In this latter solution cooperation is indeed compatible with cultural diversity, authenticity, and tolerance if we adopt what we can call the “diplomatic” approach. In this approach cultures are allowed to retain their cultural conventions, but a new set of diplomatic conventions are used when engaging in intercultural cooperation. At the end of the cooperation each group then goes back to their existing norms and conventions. But this is not multiculturalism which is an attempt to allow interpersonal cooperation--not intercultural--while preserving diversity and authenticity.

[1] See Milikan, Ruth, "Language Conventions Made Simple," Language: A Biological Model.

Cultural Homeostasis and Multicultural Neikophilia

Yet after mighty Strife had waxen great
Within the members of the Sphere, and rose
To her own honors, as the times arrived
Which unto each in turn, to Strife, to Love,
Should come by amplest oath and old decree. . .
--Empedocles


The topic of this post is to discuss which forces serve to form cultures and keep them together, and what forces serve to dissipate cultures and drive people apart. In order to understand this I need to bring new readers up to speed on several recurring themes I have discussed here. The first is the thesis that biological items such as hearts and kidneys, behaviors such as animal mating displays, manufactured artifacts such as hammers and computers, all have proper functions. The function of hearts is to pump blood, the function of mating displays is to attracts mates, the function of hammers is to drive nails, and so on. The possession of a function in this sense is a matter of the possession of a certain history. Specifically, such an item must possess a certain history of selection and copying.[1] Now, for each item that possesses a function in this sense there will be an explanation of how the item has historically managed to perform this function. This explanation will mention how the item in question has managed to “do its job” historically, what conditions were in effect, what the environment was like that allowed the item’s ancestors to successfully perform their function.

Millikan calls such an explanation a “Normal” explanation and the conditions that have historically held in order for the item to succeed in performing its function “Normal” conditions.[2] “Normal” is capitalized to prevent confusion that might occur if one was to think that such conditions are average or frequent.[3] Just think of how few sperm manage to perform their function of fertilizing an egg, or how infrequently the skull needs to perform its function of protecting the brain from impacts. You might want to think of Normal conditions as historically successful conditions, where this is understood to be the conditions under which an item’s ancestors were successful in performing their functions. In abNormal conditions an item will fail to perform its function, or at least fail to accomplish it in accordance with a Normal explanation. For example, diseased hearts are in abNormal condition, but so is being underwater for extended periods an abNormal condition for otherwise healthy lungs, and whatever it is that prevents a specific sperm from fertilizing an egg is also an abNormal condition. All of this is from the work of philosopher Ruth Millikan as first elucidated in her Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories, as well as subsequent works.

With this in mind we can move on to our current topic. One of the oldest questions of biology is what constitutes a species and what keeps a species stable through time. What makes an individual animal a member of its particular species? Do all cows have some essence in common that makes them cows and explains why they each have so many characteristics in common? Aristotle thought that the members of each species shared an eternal form or essence that constituted their essential characteristics and kept them constant through time. In contrast, modern biology does not believe there is any such essence to species, not even on the genetic level, i.e., some gene or group of such “cow genes” that all and only cows have. Instead, what keeps the characteristics of species constant is, first of all, that the genes that make cows are copied from one another. This genetic copying process that occurs in reproduction guarantees a similarity between generations.[4] Secondly, genes in a gene pool must remain sufficiently constant so as to remain compatible with one another so that when they are combined in sexual reproduction it can produce offspring that have a decent chance of viability and survival. If the diversity of genes became so great that the chromosomes of a mating pair were no longer compatible, viable offspring would not result. Finally, the environment itself will see to it through natural selection that mutations that do not provide a benefit to the individual will not get passed on. These factors will contribute to the stability of the species over time.

Biologists call the stability of a species due to these forces “homeostasis.”[5] This is what makes the existence of species possible and explains their stability in character through time. Now, cultures too have stability through time. They are not as stable as biological species, and in many countries around the world the speed of cultural change seems blindingly fast, but many features of a culture do remain constant through time. Jared Diamond discusses how the cultures of the highlands of New Guinea and the tiny Pacific Island of Tikopia had remained stable for thousands of years.[6] Although nowhere near as astable, Americans still predominantly speak English, celebrate Christmas, drive on the right, have elections, and so on. These features have remained constant over the decades and centuries. None of these traits are universal, but neither are all swans white, all birds fly, or all hearts pump blood. Nevertheless, one is justified is certain fallible inductions based on these categories.
Of course, in cultures there is not the process of genes copying one another as is the case of species homeostasis. Since cultural traits are not inherited genetically, what does explain cultural homeostasis? For one thing, behaviors, language, customs and the like are copied from person to person through family traditions and through education. Similar to the way genes are copied across generations, these behaviors and ideas are copied into new generations. But there is another force at work I wish to emphasize. Start by considering as an example Normal conditions for visual perception of color. If one is in abNormal conditions for color perception, say, it is too dark, or there are colored lights instead of sunlight, and one is unable to judge an object’s color accurately, the solution is to bring the object into Normal conditions: to bring it outdoors, for example, and look at it under the sun. Millikan writes “One knows how, physically, to maneuver oneself into conditions [N]ormal for making accurate perceptual judgments of a given kind.”[7] With either instinct or experience, people become quite good at bringing about Normal conditions in order to ensure successful functioning of their visual or linguistic or other functional mechanisms. When trying to see something, we bring objects into Normal conditions for visual perception, when trying to hear a sound we might turn our head in order to sense from which direction the sound is coming, or move closer to the sound, wine tasters cleanse their palette in order to detect subtleties of taste, and so on. Similar to these cases, people naturally will seek out conditions that are Normal for their language, customs, morals, and tastes. They need to do so if they are going to succeed in communicating and in other day-to-day activities that require coordination amongst members of a community. We naturally attune ourselves to one another to ensure successful interpersonal cooperation.

For example, when speaking to another person the hearer must be prepared to respond to ones utterance of “dog” such as to know that it refers to dogs. It will do no good to utter “dog” amongst those who are not coordinated with the speaker so as to respond to this utterance appropriately, i.e., in accordance with a Normal explanation.

Speakers within a language community are, simply, adapted to an environment in which hearers are responding, sufficiently often, to the forms speakers produce in ways that reinforce these speaker productions. Correlatively, hearers in the community are, simply, adapted to conditions under which speakers, sufficiently often, produce these language forms in circumstances such that making conventional responses to them aids those hearers. [8]

If we approach someone and they do not respond to “Have you seen my dog?” in the Normal way, perhaps if they respond with utterances in a language we do no understand, we will seek out those with whom we are Normally adapted in order to succeed in our purpose in uttering our question: in this example to receive information regarding the whereabouts of one’s dog. Just as when we are in abNormal conditions for sensory perception we will naturally seek out conditions Normal for our successful perception, we are good at getting ourselves into Normal conditions for language, morals, and behavior. This is necessary if we are going to succeed in the performance of our various interactions with each other and the world. We will seek out those to whom we are attuned in order to succeed in communication just as we seek out Normal conditions for perception in order to ensure successful sensory functioning. (Why birds of a feather flock together.)

Just as the stability of biological species results from the maintenance of compatibilities in the gene pool, the need for Normal inter-personal coordination is what keeps words meaning the same things over time, or keeps traditions alive, or keeps moral practices in existence. In the United States, drivers must coordinate with one another such that Normally everyone drives on the right, people shake hands when greeting rather than, say, bowing to one another, we start work at 9 am, we have standards for dress, we use dollars for currency, etc. These and innumerable other Normal historical coordinations are what create, constitutes, and maintains a culture; they are the bonds that hold a culture together. And just as homeostasis preserves the diversity of biological species, this process of cultural homeostasis is what preserves cultures and cultural diversity; it keeps cultures in existence and stable over time and safe from dispersal. Too much diversity on an interpersonal level can destroy cultural diversity by introducing too frequent abNormal conditions and thus disrupting the process of cultural homeostasis, just as too much diversity in the gene pool will result in genes that are incompatible with one another and unable to produce viable offspring. If this happened to all the members of a species, extinction would be the result and the world’s biological diversity of species would be lessened. Likewise, were the process of cultural homeostasis to somehow break down either by members ceasing to produce the Normal coordinating behaviors for that culture--perhaps they adopt the behaviors of another culture as in the case of cultural imperialism or invasion, or perhaps the members of the culture are widely dispersed by a hostile outside force--the culture would cease to exist and the world’s cultural diversity lessened.

Now this is the most damning argument against multiculturalism that there can be: that multiculturalism undermines the forces that make the existence of culture possible in the first place. To the extent that multiculturalism introduces abNormal conditions for language, morality, customs, and other aspects of a culture, it breaks the bonds of cultural homeostasis that allows cultures to form and keeps cultures in existence. That is, multiculturalism, if allowed to run its course and carried to its ultimate conclusion, destroys cultures and thus itself. It ultimately results in a dissolution and dissipation of culture, a sort of heat death of culture.

At the head of this blog I quote Empedocles’ views on Love and Strife (neikos). In Empedocles’ terminology, multiculturalism is an agent of Strife par excellance; it breaks the bonds that draw people together, it is the essence of neikophilia (a nice insult for multiculturalists).

Fortunately, multiculturalism is usually not allowed to run its course. The forces of cultural homeostasis are so fundamental to the ability of people to get by in the world, the necessity for Normal coordination so strong, that people seek out Normal conditions, as we have seen. People will either adapt to the dominant language and customs of a place--and thereby integrate--or they will seek out those with whom they are already adapted and congregate. As people become familiar with the Normal conditions for interaction, they learn to identify signs that may indicate its possibility and come to either avoid getting themselves into such a situation, or to prefer situations where they have no reason to expect it. Anything that indicates a different culture, origin, or history is liable to lead one to expect the presence of abNormal conditions. This is what conservatives criticize as self-segregation and liberals as white flight but there is no reason to fear it or condemn it. It is the job of social science to study the factors that foster or impede the assimilation into a given history. The thing to truly fear and condemn are those forces such as multiculturalism which serve to annihilate cultural homeostasis and disrupt the benefits we thereby enjoy of mutual coordination and cooperation.

As a final note, I am leaning towards the view that one of the functions of government is to protect the benefits that accrue to humans through our cooperation, and to prevent the forces that disrupt cooperation and cultural homeostasis: a topic for a future post.


[1] See my post “Why Diversity Destroys Social Capital” for a more detailed account.
[2] Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories, p. 33.
[3] In subsequent writing Millikan stopped capitalizing Normal, and recently has been calling Normal conditions “historically enabling” conditions (On Clear and Confused Ideas, p. 62) and Normal explanations, "normal mechanisms" (Varieties of Meaning, p. 85). I still find the capitalization helpful.
[4] Millikan, On Clear and Confused Ideas, p. 20.
[5] Eldredge and Gould, 1972, Hull 1978. Quoted in Millikan, On Clear and Confused Ideas, p. 20.
[6] Collapse, ch 9.
[7] On Clear and Confused Ideas, p 103.
[8] Language: A Biological Model, p. 57

Another Paradox of Multiculturalism

Multiculturalists demand the adoption of cultural diversity within Western nations by appealing to universal rights, and demand the destruction of cultural diversity internationally by appealing to universal rights.

Teleology and the Death of Liberalism

For most of the history of Western moral and political thinking, teleological notions held sway. Teleology revolves around the claim that some things have a natural end, aka a telos, or “final cause.” The end of the heart for example is to see to it that the body receives the nutrients contained in the blood. Where something has an end, it also has a function; it’s function being to produce its end. So again, the function of the heart is to pump blood so that it may fulfill its end of providing nutrients to the body. Furthermore, where a thing has a function it has certain features that allow it to perform its function. These are the virtues or excellences of the thing and it is the possession of the excellences or virtues that make an item a good one of its kind.

Politics was traditionally conceived of as the study of the good for mankind, ethics as the cultivation of virtue. This general framework held sway for 2000 years through Greece, Rome, and the Middle Ages, where it perhaps attained its finest elaboration of the work of St. Aquinas. Strands even survived into the 20th century.[1] However, Aristotle tried to apply teleology to physics, and so his explanation for why, say, fire rises, was that it was the end, or final cause, of fire to go up. His explanation for why stones move downward when you drop them was that it was the final cause for stones to move downward. In other words, it was not much of an explanation. The success of atomism and Newtonian physics swept away the teleological approach which had dominated for millennia. The movement of objects could now be explained by natural forces and laws without having to refer to final causes at all. As Hume writes: “all causes are of the same kind, and that in particular there is no foundation for that distinction, which we sometimes make betwixt efficient causes, and causes sine qua non; or betwixt efficient causes, and formal, and material, and exemplary, and final causes.”[2]

This scientific revolution and its banishment of teleology was then applied to the understanding of humans: the individual self became a kind of atom with its own energy in the form of desires, politics became the study of the interactions of another kind of particle known as classes. Teleology was hunted out of place after place until the faculties of the mind as well were thought of not as having functions and purposes, but mere dispositions to act under certain circumstances—to produce behavioral “outputs” in response to sensory “inputs”—the way a physical object has a disposition to behave when acted upon by external forces.

But with functions and ends also went excellences, virtues, and goods. It then became the task of moral philosophy to find a place for value and morality in this new world consisting merely of atoms subject to natural forces. At first it seemed as if physics might provide a clue. Just as physical bodies were subject to laws of nature, it was thought that the human will might be subject to moral laws of nature or laws of reason. Kant’s view of human reason as legislating universal laws is the purest elucidation of this idea. Since reason works on universal principles, moral rules thus became a kind of law of nature in the form of universal rights. What exactly our rights were was always the subject of disputes both intellectual and military. How do we come to know what our rights are? Are rights a scientific discovery? A metaphysical insight? A rule of reason? Merely utilitarian? Why hadn’t anyone realized this before? These questions were never satisfactorily answered. Also troubling was that atoms are not the kind of things that are good or bad, and no combination of them seems to add up to values. To put it in Hume’s terms, no matter of fact or relation of ideas can produce a value.

Well, it was thought in reply, if the universe has no values, at least we do. Thus utilitarianism treated all our desires equally and thought that we ought to seek the maximum satisfaction of our desires.[3] However, without a standard of goodness other than that something is desired, utilitarianism was unable to differentiate between good and bad desires such as, say, the desire that others suffer.

The model of the inherently free, self-governing, isolated, monadic self existing in a universe governed by universal rights is the essence of liberalism. Somewhere in between the self down below and universal rights up above lay culture, which came to be understood as an evil that ought to be thrown off as it merely serves to limit the freedom of the self. Ones cultural heritage, ones faith, ones family traditions, ones local attachments and affections all became imposed impediments and limitation to the free exercise of ones self-creation, the true meaning of life.[4]

Although modern philosophy claimed to eschew teleology, it was never quite able to do without it whenever it came to understanding matters of morality. For example, Kant himself speculated about the ends and function of nature, thinking that “no organ is to be found for any end unless it be the most fit and best adapted for that end” and that “the true function [of reason] must be to produce a will which is … good in itself.” Locke speculated about the “end of matrimony,” (specifically looking at nature’s ends in other animals in order to understand human behavior) and “the end of civil society.”

Just as it seemed the last vestiges of teleology had been wiped away from Western thought, it has made a comeback in recent decades. The main issue was that it seems clear that biological items such as hearts do in fact have functions. This is as much a natural phenomena as the things studied by physics. Biology is focused on understanding the functions of the kidneys, the liver, mitochondria, etc., and how these things go about performing them, as well as the reasons why they sometimes fail to perform them. There still remained the problem of understanding which of all the things something can do are its function? Why is it the function of the heart to pump blood rather than to make a "lub-dub" sound? Basically, to have a feature as a proper function requires that the item was copied from previous ancestors (the way our genes are copied from our parents’ genes for example, or that manufactured items are copies of a prototype or blueprint) and that it was selected as opposed to objects lacking this feature because it did this thing. And so a hammer has driving nails as a function because it was its ability of previous hammers to drive nails by possessing some particular shape and hardness that caused this hammer get its shape and hardness through our copying these features in manufacture. Similarly, hearts have pumping blood as their function because it is due to that fact that its ancestors pumped blood that has helped account for proliferation of the genes responsible for making hearts.[5] This approach also allows us to understand where classical teleology went wrong. Atoms, rocks, fire, chemical compounds, planets, and the like do not possess a history of selection and copying and so do not have functions.

To understand something’s function then is to understand why it keeps getting copied or reproduced, what has it done that accounts for its continued reproduction? The answer will tell us what makes a thing good.[6] In other words, you need to understand a thing’s history in order to understand its function. Modern philosophy’s great oversight was its failure to include history as a feature of objects along with primary and secondary qualities.

It is clear to me that with teleology once again philosophically respectable and rightly understood, the Western liberalism which grew up around the rejection of teleology is doomed. The main reason is that the cracks in the pillars of liberalism are now so deep, and the foundation so undermined, that the only reason the entire edifice hasn't come crumbling down is that there has been nothing on offer to replace it. No one believes in the traditional liberal view of the self, no one believes that utilitarianism is correct, nobody believes that universal rights are a priori moral principles, and everyone believes the nihilistic replacements that have been offered--post-modernism, emotivism, deconstructivism, multiculturalism--are even worse. Liberalism has just been standing on its own inertia awaiting a gust of wind. In place of utilitarianism which sought to replace nature's ends with human ends, virtue ethics will again be the name of the game. In place of non-cognitivisms such as emotivism and prescriptivism, moral realism will again thrive. In place of universal values, local historical contingencies will be respected. Instead of demands for abstract rights, claims will be resolved on the basis of social functions. Instead of seeing oneself as an isolated monad, we will see ourselves as a part of a historical tradition. Instead of rejecting culture, tradition, and heritage, these things will be seen as ones identity, great inheritance, and moral guide.[7]

To answer one possible misunderstanding, could this new understanding of values and morality justify any and all behavior, practices, and institutions? Could slavery, for example, be justified by merely saying that slavery played an important function in the economy of the South? To answer this we need to look at other cases of societal functions. Take language for instance. The proper function of the use of indicative mood is to produce true beliefs in listeners.[8] In this way a hearer is liable to gain useful information and the speaker is liable to meet his goal of spreading such information. If the speaker did not spread true beliefs, listeners would soon stop believing what was said, and if listeners stopped believing, speakers would soon stop using the indicative mood to communicate information. In the case of the imperative mood, the function is to produce action in the listener. This accomplishes its end when the action in question is to the benefit of both the speaker and listener. If the listener no longer believes that the orders that are given them are in their best interest, they will come to stop obeying the commands that are given. And if the listeners stop following the commands given by the imperative mood, speakers will soon stop using it to try to cause behavior in others. In all of the cases where interpersonal communication functions properly, there is a stabilizing function that benefits both parties and accounts for the continued use of these linguistic forms.[9] Thus, social practices are good or bad to the extent that they have a stabilizing function which benefits all parties. Slavery, of course did not benefit both parties. For the same reason, utilitarianism, to the extent that it allows some to be harmed to benefit others, is ruled out by looking to the stabilizing functions of social practices.[10]




[1] For a discussion of this history see Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue.
[2] Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, Book 1, section XIV.
[3] Mill of course did try to separate, unsuccessfully, between higher and lower pleasures, the former of which was to receive greater consideration.
[4] See my “Two Dogmas of Liberalism, part 1.”
[5] See Millikan’s “Propensities, Exaptations, and the Brain” in White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice.
[6] For example, see my entries “On Human Virtue,” and “Social Historical Kinds and Marriage.”
[7] See my “Two Dogmas of Liberalism, part 1,” and “The Origin of Values.”
[8] This is all from Ruth Millikan’s Language, Thought and Other Biological Categories, Ch. 3.
[9] See my “Why Diversity Destroys Social Capital” for a more in-depth discussion of this.
[10] Are there any cases where it is acceptable to harm some to benefit others? Perhaps in abNormal conditions, a topic for another time.

More on Multiculturalism

Suppose two cultures were having a dispute. The star-bellied Sneetches like to play their humphaphones every day at 6 PM, and the non-star-bellied Sneetches like to eat their dinners in silence at that time. The majority non-star-bellied Sneeches want to pass a noise ordinance in the neighborhood. Integration would say that the minority culture should integrate with the majority culture and give up their practice. Separatism would say that both groups can keep their practices, but do them in separate places. But what would multiculturalism say? I used to think that multiculturalism provided no answer to the question, that it was an empty doctrine. Then it hit me: multiculturalism would say that it is the majority that must give up their cultural practice and adopt the practice of the minority group, that unless the majority accommodates the cultural practice of the minority, some moral evil has occurred. Thus we see all these ridiculous efforts in the western world to appease other cultures by abandoning their own cultural practice and accepting practices and demands that they would normally not.

Multicultural Elitism

In previous posts I criticized multiculturalism by pointing out contradictions that arose when one considered what actually multiculturalism was proposing. The argument began by pointing out that the multiple cultures that multiculturalism purports to celebrate are not themselves multicultural. Thus, if multiculturalism advocates that we adopt its multicultural stance, it ends up destroying the cultures it purports to respect. That is, if everyone acts multicultural and abandons their cultural heritage, all the non-multicultural cultures—by far the vast majority of cultures on the planet—perish. Multiculturalism, thus requires that everyone else remain monocultural while we good multiculturalists float above all cultures, enjoying all the various cultural production of the Earth. And so multiculturalism requires a two-tiered system: a foundation of monocultures, and an upper-crust of those multiculturalists who do the celebrating of diversity, who consume the cultural products—music, food, art, celebrations, fashion, etc—but idenify with none themselves. Therefore, despite multiculturalism’s egalitarian rhetoric, it is in fact an elitist ideology, requiring two separate systems in order to exist. However, it is possible to allow for cultural diversity without requring a two-tiered elitist system. It is possible to eliminate the two-tiered system for what we might call multicultural atomism. In it, the elitist parasitic class, instead of feeding off others cultures, would themselves rediscover and identify with their cultural identity. However, the motto of multicultural atomism would not be “celebrate diversity,” it would be “allow diversity, celebrate your heritage.”

The Death of Post-Modernism

At the end of Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories, Millikan writes:

Descartes and then Locke, it is said, opened an era in which philosophers sought vainly to reach the world through a "veil of ideas" (or, alternatively, to pull the world in behind the veil). They placed themselves behind this veil by beginning with a vision or theory of mind as a realm in which ideas lived but which was outside the world these philosophers wished to reach with their ideas--the world, at least, of nature. Today, influenced especially by Wittgenstein and Quine, there is a new school of philosophers who live behind a veil of "theories," entangled in "language games" or in the "logical order." They too have placed themselves behind a veil by beginning with a certain vision or theory, this time a theory about language; a theory about theories--a theory entailing that theories can be meaningful theories while (like old-fashioned "ideas" and "minds") floating loose from the rest of the world. (P. 332)

This idea that we are trapped by our theories and have no way of getting out from behind them is the essence of post-modernism and the source of the current great tragedy of the Western world. It leads to multicultural relativism in that since we are trapped behind our theories there is no objective vantage point from which to compare different moral and political theories, and it leads to Personahood in that since moral theories too are floating loose from the rest of the world there is no reason to believe that ones own theory is any better than some other.

In it's place Millikan offers a realist theory of truth grounded as a natural phenomenon in the world while giving up the quest for Cartesian foundations of a priori knowledge. Under this influence this century will be a century of new moral realism based not on foundations of certainty, but on understanding our moral selves as part of the world.

A Parable

Once upon a time an evil spell was cast that afflicted the children in the land of Amoria. The people of this realm come up with a magic talisman to give to the parents that would ward off the evil spell if used alongside years of dedication to the practice of magic. The people of Amoria placed great emphasis on making sure that everyone who is going to have children receive the talisman beforehand and dedicate themselves to the practice of magic. Whenever adults intend to have children there is a great celebration as the talismans are given to them and they begin their dedication to the study of magic. It makes the adults very happy to receive these talismans since they know that their children will thus be protected.

Centuries go by and slowly the people forget about the evil spell and what the talismans are for, they eventually just think that it is a tradition and an excuse to have a coming-of-age celebration, and a way to make themselves happy by receiving the talismans. Minus an understanding of what the talismans are for, they produce less happiness than they previously did, but they are still very nice to receive. Plus, the amount of dedication it takes to practice the magic is such a chore that people lapse in its practice. Many people even throw away the talismans after they are no longer any fun. Children begin to get sick but no one can figure out why, they try many remedies but it just keeps getting worse.

Meanwhile, the people in the land of Bamoria, where there is no evil spell, hear about the talismans and the celebrations and they want to take part. Many people think that, although they can't exactly say why, the celebration and talismans should just be for Amorians since it has always been so, but others don't see the harm in letting the Bamorians have celebrations and the fun and happiness that goes along with receiving the talismans since the only point of getting the talismans is that they make you happy for a while. An old wise man comes along and says that the reason the children are getting sick is that we no longer use the talismans for what they are made for, and we no longer practice magic the way it needs to be. Plus, since only the Amorians are subject to the spell, to give the talismans to the Bamoreans is harmful because it only contributes to the view that there is no meaning to the talismans. The Bamoreans are incensed! They think that the only reason the old man is saying this is that he doesn't want the Bamoreans to have the talismans. The old man tries to explain that by giving the Bamoreans the talismans it proves the view that their true purpose is just to make yourself happy and has nothing to to with the well being of children. The Bamoreans respond, if talismans ward off an evil spell, why are so many children getting sick? The old man answers, you are looking at it the wrong way. Why do we have the talismans, what are they for, what problems were they designed to solve? The Bamoreans respond, they are not designed to solve any problem, everyone knows that. They are just for fun.

At last count 40% of the children being born in this country are born out of wedlock, up from 2% in the 1950s--an increase of 2000%. A vast body of research shows that children raised in single-parent homes are at far greater risk of poverty, school dropout, delinquency, teen pregnancy, adult joblessness, and other problems. Marriage is the social institution which was designed to avoid these terrible societal problems.

Social Historical Kinds and the Function of Marriage

If you’ve read this blog you know that I am interested in the nature of “historical kinds.” These are things that often are characterized by often having a proper function as discussed by philosopher Ruth Millikan. Items have a function in virtue of possessing a certain history, a history of selection and copying from ancestors. And so the function of the kidneys is to filter fluids, the function of a chair is to provide a place to sit, and so on. Behaviors have functions too. Animal mating dances have the function of attracting a mate, speech has the function of communicating facts, or causing behavior, or acquiring information. Human institutions have functions as well. When an individual or group of people have a common end, they form these institutions with the end of attaining of this goal. For example, the function of the U.S. Congress is to enact laws, the function of the Judicial branch is to interpret them, the function of the Executive branch is to carry them out.

To Millikan’s account of function, I took the Aristotelian move of pointing out that wherever something has a function it also has an excellence or virtue. These are the properties of a thing that were selected as opposed to something lacking that property because the possession of this property allowed the item to have a certain effect, and it is because the item had this effect that lead to its being copied (the effect in question being the function). And so hammers have their specific resilience, hardness, shape, and so on, and were copied in manufacturing as opposed to things lacking these features, because the possession of these features correlates with the ability to drive nails more positively than ones lacking these features. It is the possession of these excellences that make an item a good token of its historical kind. The extent to which the possession of excellences contributes to an item’s function makes an item better than other members of the kind. There are better or worse hammers to the degree that they can perform their function (items can have many functions, a hammer also has the function of attracting buyers, and a hammer that is worse at driving nails may actually be better at its function of attracting buyers, for instance).

Applying these results to the controversy over gay marriage gives a different perspective on the argument. The debate has generally centered around fighting over what is the definition of marriage: conservatives claiming that it is defined as the union between a man and a woman, liberals claiming that it is defined as a consensual agreement between two people who love each other. Both sides think that they can declare victory based on their definition alone, and both sides convince no one who already wasn’t convinced. But since this is A Pox on Both Your Houses, of course both are wrong. The question we must ask is not what is the definition of marriage, but what is its function. Functions do not depend on definitions. The function of the heart is to pump blood no matter how you define it. Aristotle used to think that the function of the brain was to cool the body. He was wrong, no matter how you define brain, that is not its function. And so I think that the dispute is not a mere disagreement over how do define something, I think that there is a fact about what the function of marriage is.

Marriage may have more than one function. Traditionally it was a function of marrige to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases. The characteristics of pre-marital celibacy and marital fidelity ensured that an individual would not contract such diseases. The availability of prevention and treatments for STDs has taken on this function that marriage used to serve. The remaining function of marriage is to provide an environment for the successful raising of children. A vast body of research shows that children raised in single-parent homes are at far greater risk of poverty, school dropout, delinquency, teen pregnancy, adult joblessness, and other problems. Marriage is the means of solving these problems.

Because gay relationships can not produce a child and hetero relationships can, there are problems that need to be prevented in the case of a hetero relationship that are absent in a gay relationship. Thus an institution needs to exist in the case of hetero relationships whose purpose is the prevention of these problems. This institution does not need to exist in the case of gay relationships.

As I mentioned, for each function there will be attendant virtues. Love is the primary virtue of marriage; it is what allows a marriage to perform its function of providing an environment that is safe, stable, healthy, and nurturing for children to be born into. There are other virtues in addition to love that allow a marriage to perform its function: having the means to support the child, living in a safe environment, having parents who are mature and responsible, and so on. As our undestanding of what is involved in raising children changes, the virtues of mariage can change. Also, environmental conditions will affect what is required to raise children successfully: those living in a place where resources are scarce will need to inculcate different skills and character in their children than those who are blessed with plenty, those living in a place where there are many enemies will likewise require different skills than places blessed with peace. Thus we shouldn't be suprised that marriage is very different today than it has been at other times (a point liberals believe carries a lot of weight, but doesn't make the point they think it does).

Sadly, just like in the case of diseased hearts, many marriages are bad, and for a host of possible reasons lack the virtues of a marriage and thus fail to perform their function. But just a diseased hearts still have the function of pumping blood, the function doesn’t change simply because it fails to be performed. Where the debate goes wrong from the liberal side is in confusing the function for the virtue; love is not the function of marriage. However, liberals are correct that in recent decades marriage has indeed evolved into something of a mere celebration of love. It would not be uncommon to hear the officiant at a wedding say that we gather here to celebrate the love of a couple. Traditionally, there was no question of a couple getting married but deciding not to have children. In an age lacking affective birth control it was assumed that children would soon follow from marriage and need to be supported and nurtured. With the advent of cheap and effective birth control it is quite common for couples to have no intention of raising children, and thus physical love has been spearated from the inevitability of children. This ambiguity is at the heart of the controversy and needs to be disambiguated. It is always possible to create a new social institution of “love unions” that serve the function of indicating that a couple love each other and that last only as long as they do. Such an institution would have the benefits of hospital visitation rights and so on, but would be clear on what its function is.

For example, suppose crime in a city was escalating dramatically because the police department no longer think that it is their function to prevent crime and enforce the law. Instead, the police department has morphed into an organization that believes its function is to produce police officers because police officers get respect, and that no responsibilities as regards fighting crime follow from becoming a police officer. I say that the reason crime is out of control is because the police no longer perform their function. Someone might claim that the police do perform their function, which is to gain respect. I say we need to get the police force back to enforcing the laws and catching criminals. They say that it is impossible to get the police force back to what it once was. I say that it isn’t impossible as long as we make sure that police officers are once again held to the duties, obligations, and responsibilities they once had. What’s more, despite that the police force currently thinks its function is to produce police officers, I think it makes sense to say that its true function is to enforce the law no matter whether it currently does.

I think that the misidentification of marriage as a love union rather than the attempt to raise happy, healthy, and virtuous children helps explain much of the problems surrounding marriage in contemporary society. When you understand that you are entering into an agreement designed for the nurturing of children it affects the way you view your “job” as a married person. Love unions on the other hand might have commitment ceremonies, but generally the commitment is allowed to end the moment you no longer feel like being committed. The goal of marriage is not to just enjoy the blessings of love--and so once love has faded you are free to end the union--the goal is to raise children, and this very much involves subsuming your individual desires and altering your self however is necesary to be successful in the larger purpose.

Modern marriages, or "love unions" have the following features:
1. There is no commitment to stay longer than than you want.
2. You enter into it in order to make yourself happy.
3. It’s purpose is to celebrate the love of the couple.
4. It is only the business of the couple involved, society has no interest is seeing it succeed or fail.
Marriage on the other hand:
1. Lasts until your obligation to your spouse and children ends.
2. You enter into it for the benefit of the children you will have.
3. Its purpose is to make sure the children who will result are supported and raised successfully.
4. Society has an interest in making sure marriages succeed of the negative consequences of having many troubled children.
These differences are significant enough to be describing totally separate things.

This misunderstandng of marriage as a love union has had tragic yet predictable results. At last count 40% of the children being born in this country are born out of wedlock, up from 2% in the 1950s. This is a catastrophe on a vast scale. Two lessons can be drawn from this: the liberal indoctrination of condom use has failed, and the conservative insistence on abstinence has failed. I would argue that the reason both have failed is that in both approaches the responsibility is on the individuals to take steps to prevent pregnancy, and that there are few negative consequences if pregnancy occurs. Previously there was intense societal pressure to make sure that if a man got a woman pregnant, he would “do the right thing” and marry her; the responsibility was on the whole community to make sure that this happened. The force of the expectations and pressure placed by the family, neighborhood, and society at large must be restored as it is the only solution we know of as a fact that is successful in preventing out of wedlock childbirth. The demand must be that marriage is what happens when you expect to get a woman pregnant, or already have. Likewise, the community must share the responsibility to make sure that the couple can successfully raise their child. The idea that the community is going to force a couple to get married, by shotgun, by sanction, or by stigma, is alien to today’s society, but is the norm of the vast expanse of history, and is the only way we know of to prevent appalling rates of children born out of wedlock. Perhaps if the consequences of siring a child are so severe liberals will get their wish of a world where there is far more condom use.

It is the primary function of marriage to prevent this current state of affairs. This is its raison d’etre. Marriage performs this function by possessing three obligations: first, marriage is an obligation to your spouse that you will not abandon them to raise the child alone, second, marriage is an obligation to your child that you will not abandon them, third, marriage is an obligation to the society at large that you will see to it that your child is raised right and not abandoned. Marriage is a right only insofar as you have the right to take on these three obligations. There are no rights without obligations--for example, my right to free speech carries the obligation that I don’t deny others this right, and likewise for other rights. In the case of gay marriage, none of these obligations follow since there is no child to worry about. Without any obligation, there is no right.

What about the case where a gay couple wishes to adopt? I am in favor of gay adoption, but there is no need for marriage here because there is no problem to be avoided by such a marriage. Gay couples do not run the risk of creating a society with massive numbers of out of wedlock children. Preventing this is one of the functions of marriage, and, just as the fact that if you don't have something whose function is to pump blood you don't have a heart, if there is no societal problem to be avoided, there is no marriage.

For example, suppose that the purpose of the army is solve the problem of how to defend the country from attack. When you join the infantry you take on certain obligations, say you need to be able to carry a certain amount of weight, run at a certain speed, and fire a gun accurately. You do have a right to try out for the infantry, but if you can’t do these things you will be unable to fulfill your obligations and so you do not get to join the infantry. There is no unjust discrimination in doing so. Suppose someone still wants to help defend the country even if they are unable to join the infantry. We should be very happy to receive their help, but still, they can’t join the infantry. Likewise, the purpose of marriage is to prevent the societal problems that result from the production of children who are born and either abandoned or raised by a single parent. Gay marriage does not solve the societal problems I’ve mentioned because there are no such societal problems caused by gay relationships because there are no children that result and need to be cared for. However, if homosexuals wish to help resolve the problems caused by others by adopting a child we should welcome their help. Adoption has a different function, it is to take care of children that have already been abandoned. Whereas marriage is preventative, adoption is curative.


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(1) Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories, p. 33.

Great Article

There is a great article by James Matthew Wilson entitled "The Treasonous Clerk: Empire of Addiction, Part I." Here is a taste:

In the mainstream of American politics, there are only two acceptable positions—only two voices ever allowed to speak loud enough to inform federal policy without being instantly slandered in the press and excluded from the halls of government. The supposed “conservative” one advocates the expansion of American economic and political influence across the face of the earth by means of economic and military might. That which passes quite respectably for liberal argues, “Yes, let’s do become the Nomos of the Earth, but let’s do it to others the same way we did it to ourselves; let’s slowly dissolve the bonds, traditions, and practices of every other country, until every country becomes any country, which in turn means they’ll all just be our country.” The difference is no greater than that, and neither ever states the obvious foundation of our foreign policy: a dependence on resources abroad for a concentrated, addictive, and, in a sense, fictive economic growth at home.

Read the rest here.

On Cultural Diversity

One of the most atrocious things happening in the world is the destruction of indigenous cultures, languages, and peoples by globalization and cultural imperialism. When I see footage from Africa or southeast Asia, heirs to ancient and unique cultures and civilizations, and everyone looks like they just walked out of the Gap, I find it nauseating. The idea of everyone on Earth dressing the same, listening to the same music, watching the same movies, and having the same ideas once globalization has conquered all is a nightmare. But I love cultural diversity the way I admire my child's classmates: I might admire them, applaud their abilities and talents, and my child might not be the nicest, or smartest, or most talented, and I certainly don't want the other kids to imitate mine, but I still love my child the most. I just wish my kid were more virtuous.
My desire is to preserve the world's many cultural traditions from the onslaught of globalization without falling prey to the elitism of multiculturalism. I think it's an empirical fact that the vast majority of people in the world see their identity in their family, their faith, and their heritage. It is in these people that we find the true cultural diversity around the world and where there remains hope that it can still be preserved, against globalization, if that's even possible at this point. The alternative is to embrace the nauseating homogeny of globalization.

Front Porch Republic

A new site featuring a collection of writers has started up called "Front Porch Republic" and it has already become my favorite site on the Internet for intelligent commentary. Check it out:

http://www.frontporchrepublic.com/

A Paradox of Diversity

There is no such thing as diversity per se. Every type of diversity is also a type of homogeny. For example, if every street with 100 houses contained families representing 100 different cultures, it would in one sense be diverse, but in another sense it would be entirely homogenous in that every street would be the same as every other street. Or if each nation on Earth was culturally homogenous, on one level this would be a case be homogeny, but the Earth as a whole would be diverse in that each nation would be culturally distinct.

The promoters of diversity love to praise diversity, but they never tell us which brand of homogeny they are in turn promoting. Nor do they give us a reason why one type of diversity/homogeny should be preferable to another.

True diversity would be a world that had a mix of both homogeny and diversity (such a world would be more diverse than one that just contained diversity). But this is not the type of thing that can be adopted by urging that we foster diversity since we need a way of deciding whether it is homogeny or diversity that we ought to adopt in this case. Perhaps it would be based on what maximizes happiness, or fosters social capital, or furthers some standard of justice.

Three Responses to the Destruction of Social Capital

In my last post I discussed the phenomena of “meaning decay” that inevitably occurs when historically-derived semantic producer/consumer pairs exist in abNormal conditions. In light of these conclusions, much of the political debate around multiculturalism can be seen as ways of dealing with meaning decay. There appears to me to be three possible political responses. The first is to do nothing in the face of meaning decay and allow social capital to wane and so come to exist in an alienated society. I take this to be the consequence of multiculturalism. As discussed in my previous post, Harvard researcher Robert Putnam has documented how increased diversity leads to reduced social capital and increased alienation. This I take to be an unacceptable outcome as much of what we consider to be the good derives from the bonds of trust and good-will that constitute social capital. The question then is what to do in light of these findings.

The second possible response is to enact laws and policies that attempt to reverse meaning decay by attacking its causes on a micro level. These attempts always involve reducing individual freedom by passing laws, regulations, and policies that attempt to force homogeny and reduce cultural diversity. This is the policy of integration. For example, Quebec has enacted policies for the mandatory use of French and France has banned the wearing of Islamic headscarves in schools. On my account these would be considered cases of a policy of integration since it uses government intervention to force homogeny on the populace. The real question is why, after hundreds (or thousands) of years where such a policy was unnecessary, did it finally become needed? The answer is that recent increased diversity in Quebec and France was causing meaning decay and required a response. They have decided on a policy of integration to combat this problem. But this has resulted in new interventionist government authority to clamp down on “language crimes.” Although perhaps necessary and inevitable this is surely not an optimal outcome in a free and open society where one would prefer not to need to resort to new punitive laws that reduce individual freedom.

But more importantly, these laws never succeed in doing what they aim to do. Despite heroic efforts in the name of such integrationist policies over the past 60 years, social capital has continued to wane under the pressure of meaning decay. The data, as documented in Bowling Alone, show the failure of this approach. In my post “Why Integration has Failed” I offer one explanation for why this occurs. But another reason for this is that the laws themselves almost always contribute to the decay of social capital in that, although they try to formulate them in neutral terms, there is always a target group at which the law is aimed. This further serves to alienate people from one another. Nations with high social capital always are so without resorting to such measures.

And so the third response would be to enact policies that try to avoid the onset of meaning decay in the first place, or to enact polices that attack its causes on a macro level. This is the approach of communitarianism. On my understanding, communitarianism is rightly thought of not as a theory of rights, but as the position that social capital should be maximized by avoiding the abNormal conditions that lead to meaning decay. Communitaianism has sometimes described as the theory that individual rights can be violated in order to pursue the common good. On the account of communitarianism I am proposing this is not necessarily the case as the question of whether individual rights maximize social capital remains open. I would argue that individual rights do in fact help to further social capital as the places with the greatest social capital also have a high degree of personal freedom. The key in places with high degrees of social capital is not restrictions on individual liberty in the name of conformity, but the presence of a common historical heritage and culture. And this is what communitarianism should aim to protect.

Why Diversity Destroys Social Capital

In 2006 Harvard researcher Robert Putnam released the results of his long-awaited research that showed that increased diversity lead to a reduction in social capital. Putnam’s massive study concluded that greater diversity lead to less civic participation, less charity, less trust, less voting, less church attendance, less contribution to community projects. “In the presence of diversity, we hunker down”, he said. “We act like turtles. The effect of diversity is worse than had been imagined. And it’s not just that we don’t trust people who are not like us. In diverse communities, we don’t trust people who do look like us.”

When the data were adjusted for class, income and other factors, they showed that the more people of different races lived in the same community, the greater the loss of trust. “They don’t trust the local mayor, they don’t trust the local paper, they don’t trust other people and they don’t trust institutions,” said Prof Putnam. “The only thing there’s more of is protest marches and TV watching.”(http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c4ac4a74-570f-11db-9110-0000779e2340.html)

These results have been echoed in other studies as well. For example, Dronkers finds that:

1) neighborhoods’ ethnic diversity reduces individual trust in neighborhoods; 2)
those with neighbors of a different ethnicity have less trust in neighborhoods
and neighbors 3) a substantial part of the effect of neighborhoods’ ethnic
diversity on individual trust can be explained by the higher propensity of
having neighbors of a different ethnicity. We conclude that ethnic diversity can
have a negative effect on individual trust. (Dronkers 2008)

And Hero finds that “When we considered the interaction of diversity and social capital, a powerfule dampening effect of the former on the latter was shown” (Hero 2007: 157).

These startling results had less of an effect on public discourse that one would expect, in part because they are so profound, but also because Putnam did not offer an explanation for his findings. Why does diversity destroy social capital? What is the process by which this occurs? These questions are not addressed in Putnam’s study. This has allowed commentators to claim that Putnam’s results confirmed their pre-existing perspective: liberals saw it as confirmation of persistent prejudice and racism, conservatives saw it as a confirmation that multiculturalism is destructive to society. Since one could interpret Putnam’s findings as confirmation of whatever one already believed, the discussion has not stayed in the public consciousness to the degree one would expect. This post explains why and how diversity destroys social capital and thus gives a way of understanding the consequences of Putnam’s findings.

The way to begin is to consider how language and culture are supposed to work in the first place. This will allow us to understand how things go wrong and social capital is destroyed. How does something such as language and culture get a function? The best current understanding is that biological items such as these get their functions not by what they do, but by possessing a certain history. For example, the function of hearts is to pump blood, the function of birds' feathers is to aid in flight (amongst other things), etc. Hearts, for example, have pumping blood as their function because they are produced by genetic mechanisms that have historically proliferated by natural selection because of their ability to produce these items that pump blood. Manufactured items like hammers have driving nails as their function because it was the ability of previous hammers to drive nails that has lead to the copying of these artifacts.

For each item that possesses a function in this sense there will be an explanation of how the item has historically managed to perform this function. This explanation will mention how the structure of the item in question has managed to “do its job” historically, what conditions were in effect, what the environment was like that allowed the item to successfully perform it function. Millikan calls such an explanation a “Normal” explanation and the conditions that have historically held in order for the item to succeed in performing its function “Normal” conditions.(1) “Normal” is capitalized to prevent confusion that might occur if one was to think that such conditions are average or frequent. Just think of how few sperm manage to perform their function of fertilizing an egg, or how infrequently the skull needs to perform its function of protecting the brain. In abNormal conditions an item will fail to perform its function, or at least fail to accomplish it in accordance with a Normal explanation. Diseased hearts are in abNormal condition, but so is being underwater an abNormal condition for otherwise healthy lungs, and whatever it is that prevents a specific sperm from fertilizing an egg is also an abNormal condition.

Behaviors have functions as well. The function of turning on the light switch is to illuminate the room, the function of animal mating displays is to attract mates, the function of asking someone to pass the salt is to bring it about that you receive the salt. In the case of communication, both the one initiating the communication and its intended recipient must be so situated so that communication can proceed Normally. In other words, communication requires that the producer and consumer of the utterance be coordinated to one another so that the producer produces and the consumer consumes Normally. For instance, the hearer must be prepared to respond to ones utterance of “dog” such as to know that it refers to dogs. It will do no good to utter “dog” amongst those who are not coordinated with the speaker so as to respond to this utterance appropriately, i.e., in accordance with a Normal explanation.

Speakers within a language community are, simply, adapted to an environment in which hearers are responding, sufficiently often, to the forms speakers produce in ways that reinforce these speaker productions. Correlatively, hearers in the community are, simply, adapted to conditions under which speakers, sufficiently often, produce these language forms in circumstances such that making conventional responses to them aids those hearers. (Language: A Biological Model, p. 57)

People continue to utter “dog” in order to refer to dogs only insofar as listeners often enough continue to respond to this utterance appropriately. It is in both the speaker’s and hearer’s interest to continue to respond in this way since the hearer is liable to gain useful information and the speaker is liable to meet his goal of spreading such information. "Dog" has been copied from person to person for generations because it is successful in doing so. Thus using “dog” to refer to dogs will remain in use as long as it manages to perform its function of stabilizing speakers and hearers. The “stabilizing function” a linguistic form performs is one of the aspects of the term’s meaning.(2)

It is important to understand that the stabilizing proper functions can be destroyed by abNormal conditions. If a speaker never receives the Normal response from its intended consumers, speakers will come to cease trying to get their purpose across by means of using language in conventional ways. And if speakers do not use linguistic forms Normally, a hearer will soon stop trying to extract useful information from them from which to form beliefs. To take an obvious example, just think about being placed in a country that speaks a different language. If you approach a person and try to get information from them by using the inquisitive mood, but they do not respond by using language forms that you understand, conditions are abNormal for the use of the inquisitive mood in ones language and meaning has broken down. You may try your luck with a few other people hoping that one of them will be adapted to respond to your language production, but after a few tries you will soon stop trying to communicate with others by the means of your native language. The same goes if someone approaches you and begins producing sounds to which you are not properly adapted for interpreting. You will soon either try to communicate in some other way, by gestures perhaps, and thereby try to direct the person to someone who may be able to help, but you will probably cease to try to communicate by using your language. If you have ever been in a situation where either no one can understand your language, or where someone continues to speak to you in a language you do not understand you will know what an anxiety producing situation it can be.

Meaning can be destroyed in less extreme cases as well. Take the case of the use of the indicative mood. Its proper function is to produce true beliefs in its listeners and it does this Normally when the speaker/producer has a true belief, tells the fact to the listener/consumer, and they then come to possess a true belief. This function can be destroyed by abNormality when the speaker does not have a true belief (but thinks they do), has true beliefs but spreads a false statement (lies), or when the consumer misunderstands or refuses to believe the statement. For example, in authoritarian regimes where people come to realize that the government media can not be trusted to provide the truth, people will longer believe what is being told to them. Likewise, an individual or organization who has proven them self to be untrustworthy will soon find it impossible to be believed. And someone who is so stubborn that they refuse to believe anything that is told to them will soon find that few people will make the effort to tell them anything.

In the case of the imperative mood, the function is to produce action in the listener. This happens Normally when the action in question is to the benefit of both the speaker and listener. The Normal functioning of the imperative mood can be impeded when the listener no longer believes that the orders that are given them are in their best interest. They will come to stop obeying the commands that are given. And if the listeners stop following the commands given by the imperative mood, speakers will soon stop using it to try to cause behavior in others.

Millikan has not given a name for the process by which the meaning of a term (its stabilizing proper function) is undermined by abNormal conditions but I propose we call it “meaning decay,” and the end state of this process in which one no longer produces such language items, “meaning extinction.”

We are now in a position to address the nature of social capital and how diversity undermines it. It should be fairly obvious that the point of the preceding discussion is this: social capital exists to the extent that interpersonal communication proceeds Normally, and is lost to the extent that abNormal conditions prevent successful functioning and causes meaning decay. Social capital just is the presence of Normal conditions for culture and language and diversity destroys social capital by preventing their Normal functioning. To take some examples: we have already discussed how being in the presence of those who can not understand ones language—that is, where a producer reproduces a linguistic form in the absence of a Normal consumer—will eventually result in the producer to stop producing. The degree to which cultural diversity results in the presence of many speakers of another language the more liable it is to produce abNormal conditions and thus meaning decay. But it is not only the failure to use the same words to mean the same things that can produce this effect. Even the collection of distinctive inflections, phonemes, and emphasis that we call an accent has its proper functions. If one feels that ones listeners are not picking up on the subtleties that are conveyed with an accent, meaning decay is the result and one will quickly either adopt the regional accent or go find others who are situated as to appreciate it. Listeners that don’t get your joke, react to you in unexpected ways, have different habits, moral standards, or mannerisms will produce similar results.

There are ways of communicating Normally besides through the use of language. Any case where a sign has been designed to coordinate between producer and consumer will do. For example, soldiers wear their ranks on their uniforms where they can be clearly perceived by their intended audience. The insignia both tells consumers what the rank is and so prescribes appropriate behavior.(3) Likewise, wedding rings convey the information that its bearer is married. Most attire possesses natural information, although not as explicitly as in the case of uniforms. People coordinate their apprearances as styles are replicated and selected in the adoption of fashions for various reasons including, but not exclusively because, what ones appearance "says" about you. Dressing like a businessman, or punk, or goth, or hippie, or any other distinctive attire is a way to tell both other members and non-members of your group of your membership. That people coordinate their appearances seems to be a cultural universal.

As in the language examples above, meaning decay can occur when one wears an article of clothing or insignia amongst those who are not the Normal consumers. The meaning of the stripes on a soldiers uniform decays when worn among civilians who do not know their significance. It is being produced, but the Normal consumers (other members of the military) are missing. From the consumer’s side, seeing someone wearing something with obvious meaning, but for whom you are not historically attuned, causes meaning decay as well. Examples of this are the Muslim head scarf and other religious and/or cultural garb when worn among those brought up in different traditions. The head scarf is a sign of modesty, of imitating the wives of Muhammad, and it indicates this Normally when the wearer and perceiver are historically adapted to interpret it is this way. In such a case meaning decay does not occur merely because one does not understand the meaning, something which might quickly be corrected by asking (or looking it up on Wikipedia), it is that when worn amongst non-members it also indicates that you are not the intended consumer; that you are outside the Normal producer/consumer pair. It thus produces such meaning decay and its corresponding destruction of social capital.

The most extreme case is where moral standards differ between populations. Whatever account one may accept of the origins of morality, moral behavior remains in practice in a population for a reason. Whether this is for religious, utilitarian, or deontological reasons matters not for our current discussion. In other words, moral behavior has a stabilizing function. Someone performing an act which they believe to be moral, but others believe to be immoral destroys this stabilizing function and is a more devastating blow to social capital than any other case. Female genital mutilation, honor killings, abortion, homophobia, animal cruelty or any other practice that is deemed immoral by some in a population will cause severe meaning decay and destruction of social capital.

As people become familiar with the phenomena of meaning decay, they learn to identify signs that may indicate its possibility and come to either avoid getting themselves into such a situation, or to prefer situations where they have no reason to expect it. This is what Putnam describes as “hunkering down” or metaphorically as pulling in like a turtle. Anything that indicates a different culture, origin, or history is liable to lead one to expect meaning decay. Thus the expectation of meaning decay can come to have a negative affect on social capital just as much as actual instances of it. It is important to note that there is no bigotry, racism, or prejudice involved in preferring the presence of those with whom one can communicate Normally. These vices can themselves cause meaning decay if they lead you to not benefit by acquiring new knowledge, or doing what is in your best interest, because you blindly refuse to believe or follow what is said by someone against whom you are prejudiced. But preferring the presence of those one can expect to communicate with Normally is not immoral or a vice. The benefits of living in a place with high social capital are many and research shows that people are far happier in such places. The reasons for avoiding meaning decay are the same as those for having language, culture, and communication in the first place--the bebefits that result from coordination and cooperation. It should thus be clear why social capital and diversity are incompatible, and why efforts to make diversity and social capital compatible are bound to fail.

In a future post I discuss the claim that it is a legitimate concern of government to enact policies that prevent the disintegration of social capital.


_________________________________
(1) Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories, p. 33.
(2) Language: A Biological Model, p. 58.
(3)This is what Millikan calls a “pushmi-pullyu” representation based on the creature from Dr. Doolittle. Pushmi-pullyus have two faces--they communicate facts, and direct behavior. See Language: A Biological Model, ch. 9.

On Human Virtue

Virtue ethics require a foundation of teleology. However teleology was eschewed by philosophers when the Aristotelian apparatus of functions, virtues, and ends became suspect by modern philosophy. However, teleology is again acceptable to contemporary philosophy because it has been naturalized, i.e., explained in purely natural terms. For example, in Millikan's account to have a feature as a proper function requires that the item was copied from previous ancestors (the way our genes are copied from our parents’ genes for example, or that manufactured items are copies of a prototype) and that it was selected as opposed to other things because it did this thing. And so a hammer has driving nails as a function because it was its ability of its ancestors to drive nails by possessing some particular shape and hardness that caused this hammer get its shape and hardness through our copying these features from its ancestors in manufacture. Similarly, hearts have pumping blood as their function because it is due to that fact that its ancestors pumped blood that has helped account for proliferation of the genes responsible for making hearts. The theory does not leave anything irreducibly and mysteriously teleological, to have a function is an entirely natural phenomena.

On my entry of January 10th, “The Goodness of Nature,” I stated that, as along Aristotelian lines, whenever something has a function it has certain properties that allow it to perform this function. These properties are the excellences or virtues of the object. It is the possession of these features that make the object a good instance of its type of thing. And so hammers for example are good if they possess the features that allow it to perform their function of driving nails: its shape, its hardness, resiliency, and so forth.

Human behavior has functions as well, and just as in the case of manufactured items or biological items, human virtue are the properties of behaviors that allow them to perform their function. For example, when people communicate facts to each other through the use of the indicative mood, the function of this behavior is to cause true beliefs in the one you are speaking to.(1) In order for this behavior to succeed in performing its function normally requires that the speaker intend to produce true beliefs in the hearer, and the hearer to believe what is spoken to them. This is the nature of the social virtues of honesty and trust. Likewise, when someone tells another to perform some behavior by using he imperative mood, this behavior has the function of producing behavior in the listener. Normally the behavior in question benefits both the speaker and hearer (otherwise people would soon stop using the imperative mood). The attendant virtues of the indicative mood are magnanimity and obedience. These are what we might call “universal human virtues.” Vice results in the abNormal condition of intentionally spreading false beliefs contra the stabilizing proper function of the indicative mood (lying) and using the imperative mood to command someone to do what is not in their best interest (ill will). On the consumer side we have refusing to believe what is true (cynicism?), and refusing to do what is in ones best interest (spite? stubborness?).

The same applies to any case of human cooperation, regardless of culture, there will be attendant human virtues. There are other virtues that we might call "cultural virtues" which relate to a specific culture. A culture existing in an environment with scarce resources might value frugality more than one blessed with plenty, for instance. Or one with a history of being invaded by foreign powers might come to value bravery and other martial virtues over a culture that is secure in its safety. See my posts "Why Some Values are Successful" and "The Origin of Values."

Likewise, human faculties such as practical and theoretical reason will have their attendant virtues. And the presence of the virtues of our bodily organs, the condition we call health, contributes to the overall condition of human flourishing. As Millikan writes:

Yet looked at another way, to talk about your explicit purposes, your intentions, is merely another way of talking about the natural purposes of your represented intentions themselves. They have natural purposes just as do many other parts of yourself such as your heart and your eyes and the nerve connections responsible for your reflexes, your coordinated responses and your tastes for sweets. And turning the coin over again, the purposes of these other parts and aspects of you are as much purposes of yours as are the purposes of your explicit intentions. After all, what you are is he sum and interaction of all the various parts and aspects of yourself, and vice versa. (Varieties of Meaning, p. 10.)

All these various parts and aspects of yourself have their attendant virtues and to the extent that these virtues are present is the extent to which we call a person good.

__________________________
1. See Millikan, Ruth, Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories, ch 3.

Rise of the red Tories

There is a great article located at: http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=10608
It touches on all the themes I have been arguing for here in a proposal for a new conservatism based on localization and communitarianism. Here is a taste that sounds like it came right from my last post:

To understand why the legacy of liberalism produces both state authoritarianism and atomised individualism, we must first note that philosophical liberalism was born out of an 18th-century critique of absolute monarchies. It sought to protect the rights of the individual from arbitrary abuse by the king. But so extreme did the defence of individual liberty become that each man was obliged to refuse the dictates of any other—for that would be simply to replace rule by one man's will (the king) with rule by another. As such, the most extreme form of liberal autonomy requires the repudiation of society—for human community influences and shapes the individual before any sovereign capacity to choose has taken shape. The liberal idea of man is then, first of all, an idea of nothing: not family, not ethnicity, not society or nation. But real people are formed by the society of others. For liberals, autonomy must precede everything else, but such a "self" is a fiction. A society so constituted would be one that required a powerful central authority to manage the perpetual conflict between self-interested individuals.

Two Dogmas of Liberalism (Or, How to Win the Culture War): Part 1, The Monadic Self

It is more and more common to hear conservatives claim that the culture war has been lost. The reasons for the loss that one hears most often are either that the media endlessly depicts the joys of liberalism without giving any favorable depictions of traditional values, or that there is just something about the “do whatever feels good” strand of liberalism that is irresistibly seductive. Although there is something to these claims I want to instead focus on the philosophical foundations of liberalism that provide the basis for the liberal argument. Specifically, I wish to argue that the reason traditionalism continually loses its argument with liberalism is that conservatives implicitly share two premises which lie at the foundation of liberalism, and because they share these premises they are unable to formulate effective replies to the liberal argument.

The first of these shared premises I wish to discuss is the view of the self as a free, isolated, monad. The problem is that whenever traditionalists urge for the values of loyalty, community, patriotism, virtue, and responsibility, they continually bump up against the isolated, independent, self-governing, monadic self and all such traditional values thereby become recast as limitations on the exercise of the self’s free nature.

It is helpful to start our examination of this view of the self by reviewing Kant. Kant pointed out that all of our inclinations—our tastes, desires, instincts, appetites, affections, etc.,--are caused by our upbringing, culture, or biology. In this sense, he argued that any behavior resulting from our inclinations, since they are caused by outside influence--and therefore not free--as not having moral worth. But Kant thought that behind our inclinations lay the self which acts from pure reason and is free from inclination; only by acting from universal principles of pure reason are your actions moral and free. All human beings are alike in their capacity to reason and to thus act freely, and to come to the conclusion that to act morally is to respect the freedom of others. From this much of the contemporary Western view of universal human rights and freedom derives.

At this point the stage was set for a Nietzsche to come along and argue that to be free is to reject everything that you yourself did not cause. Building on the foundation laid by Kant, he too came to believe that freedom can only be obtained by having your actions not be the result of outside influence. But Nietzsche rejected the notion that freedom means acting in accordance with universal moral principles. Morality too for Nietzsche was merely part of your culture and upbringing and ought to be resisted. That is to say, if we are caused to act in certain ways by our culture or upbringing, acting in such a way is then inauthentic. To be free and authentic is to create your own values and self, otherwise we are just cogs in machine playing roles we had no part in creating. Today it is those I call the Personas who come closest to this view. Personas, who are mostly white, urban liberals, although there are many Personas among Libertarians and neo-cons as well, feel no affinity for their cultural traditions. They have come to believe that culture is something to be resisted, that it merely limits the self, or that it amounts to blind conformity, and that only what one achieves through pure individual will in an act of self-creation has value.(1)

This view has always been the enemy of traditionalists, yet they have not come up with a successful competing view of the self that can resist these conclusions. I believe that such a view is now on the table in respectable philosophical circles. To see this we need to delve closer into the nature of the self. The place to start is by considering how living things (such as us) get their distinctive characteristics. This is through a process of copying and selection. Our genes, for example, are originally copies of our parents’ genes, and then copies of each other through cell division. Our bodily organs such as the heart are formed through our genes in a process of copying; if the genes that control the formation of your ancestors’ heart were different, your heart would be isomorphically different. Behaviors too are copies. Each time I turn on a light switch I am copying the behavior I learned when very young. The things we manufacture are copies of some prototype or blueprint used to start the manufacturing process. Language is learned by copying the sounds we hear as infants, communication exists by the copying of ideas from individual to individual. When I tell someone “The train arrives at 10:30 am” normally they then produce a copy of this belief in their minds. Our scientific ideas about the nature of the world are copied to us through a chain that started with the work of some scientist, was copied to his colleagues through speech, or written or electronic communication, copied into textbooks, copied into the minds of educators, and copied again through speech into your brain in a classroom. The same goes for our values, desires, tastes and so forth (although of course the history involved is unique for each).

A distinguishing feature of all of these things is that they have functions or purposes, and these purposes are the reason these items were selected and copied. The purpose of the heart is to pump blood, the purpose of a hammer is to drive nails, my purpose in turning on the light is to illuminate the room, the function of communicating through language is to spread true beliefs or cause behavior in others. Contrast this with rocks, atoms, molecules, planets, and so on which do not have proper functions and are categorized by some common inner structure.(2) This view of inherent functions being the result of a history of copying and selection is the thesis of the groundbreaking work of philosopher Ruth Millikan in her landmark work Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories. Things that are categorized by their history-derived function in this way are called “historical kinds” by Millikan.

Biological items like hearts and mitochondria, behaviors, beaver lodges and bee hives, cathedrals, televisions, sonnets and symphonies are all historical kinds. Now, unlike rocks, atoms, and planets, and like all of the important features of living things, the self is an historical kind. But it is not some rational monad lying behind our desires and emotions. The self is the sum of all the historically-derived purposes that constitute our person, acquired as well as innate. As Millikan puts it:

Yet looked at another way, to talk about your explicit purposes, your intentions, is merely another way of talking about the natural purposes of your represented intentions themselves. They have natural purposes just as do many other parts of yourself such as your heart and your eyes and the nerve connections responsible for your reflexes, your coordinated responses and your tastes for sweets. And turning the coin over again, the purposes of these other parts and aspects of you are as much purposes of yours as are the purposes of your explicit intentions. After all, what you are is he sum and interaction of all the various parts and aspects of yourself, and vice versa. (Varieties of Meaning, p. 10.)

And I would add that since all of these purposes are the result of the possession of a certain history, the answer to the question of “what am I?” is “you are your history.”

Coming to see the self as an historical kind can't help but affect the way one sees oneself and understands one's place in the world. The values you inherit, the faculties of your mind, the functions of your body, your ideas about the nature of the world, as well as the personal events that cause new beliefs and values, are all the result of your history. The historical events behind these purposes are as much a part of you as your individual intentions and desires. Say you value freedom of speech. This value got to you through a long history of debates, wars, great and horrible deeds, sacrifices, and effort. It is now a part of you as are those events. To know one’s self is to know the history of all the various parts that constitute it: this is the process of self-discovery. In this light you can not help but feel a deep indebtedness and kinship to your ancestors and an affinity for those who likewise share this history.

In contrast, instead of self-discovery the Personas urge that self-creation ought to be our goal. Now, if the Personas are right there is some way to be free from influence and self-create your ideas, values, desires, tastes, and so forth. But our discussion so far should show just why this is impossible as all our faculties and the vast majority of our ideas are inherited. This is not to say that we inherit our specific conscious intentions from nature, such as our intention to go to the movies, or make dinner. But our mental faculties for developing concepts and collecting information and forming intentions are indeed built in by our genes. These faculties have the job of turning perceptions into beliefs, learning through conditioning, or trial and error, or through any other means. Our creative faculties allow insight and inspiration that allows the creation of new and innovative work in the arts and sciences. All of these purposes are either designed by nature or designed by things that are designed by nature. These are not acts of pure self-creation. In this way artists can modify or react to the work of other artists, and scientists can build on the theories of others, but they are still inheriting the ideas they go on to modify and send off to others for replication. Likewise, each individual can come to see how their past influences their behavior, combine it with other beliefs and desires, and come to alter their behavior. This is the nature of originality and individuality, but it is not what the Personas have in mind when they speak of individuality which is to be free from outside influence. To have originality and creativity is to be part of a tradition, something you inherit, hopefully improve, and pass on to others.

The question them becomes once the monadic self is given up for the historical self, what are the ethical and political implications?

The debate over the “culture war” is not so much about the specific hot-button social issues so much as it is a battle over the relationship between the self and culture. Personas think that we ought to be resist cultural influence, only in this way can we be authentic and free. They believe that tradition, national pride, patriotism, and loyalty are empty concepts, or outright evils that ought to be eliminated. Traditionalists honor their history and culture and see the great debt they owe to their forefathers. But what’s more they see that you can not understand yourself as apart from the ancestors of your ideas and body, they have made you who you are, and that it is impossible for it to be otherwise.

Given the nature of the self as an historical kind, traditionalists are right and Personas wrong. The virtues of patriotism, community, honor for one's ancestors, sense of place, cultural pride, and family, are not shackles on the freedom of the will, they are instead the natural consequence of coming to understand oneself and how history has formed us into who we are.
Authenticity is not the result of casting off all cultural inheritance, but rather is the result of understanding its contribution in making you who you are, seeing this as your great inheritance, identity, and birthright, contributing to it, and embracing it.

The consequences of abandoning the monadic self are widespread, and some positions we have come to think of as conservative would have to be abandoned since they receive their foundation upon it. I will mention three such cases although I am sure there are more.

First, meritocracy, which through the influence of the neo-cons has come to be part of the conservative argument, will need to be abandoned. Rawlsian liberals have criticized this stance on the grounds that inequalities resulting from inborn talents are not just and fair since talents are not essential to the monadic self. Rawls, for example, says that “the self is prior to the ends that are affirmed by it” (A Theory of Justice, p. 560). But this is not the case if the self is an historical kind. If the self is the sum of our inherited faculties and ideas, the Rawlsian criticism falls flat. Yet meritocracy itself relies on the notion of isolated individuals each rationally negotiating to maximize their utility. Instead, it is the communitarian criticism of Rawls based on the notion of the embedded self that comes closest to capturing our current understanding. Communitarian political theorists such as Charles Taylor have been criticizing the Kantian/Rawlsian self for being empty, it being contended that the self is instead “situated.” For Taylor the self is situated in one's community values, but since these are the result of history as well, we instead would say that the self is situated in history. Since Rawlsian liberals rely on an atomic self to ground their politics, and communitarians argue that the self is situated in existing cultural practices, values, and ways of life—all of which are historical kinds—the current discussion favors the communitarian understanding over liberal or libertarian theories. What form this would take will have to be the subject for future posts.

Secondly, the state will need to abandon its current notion of being culturally neutral. Since there is no clear dividing line between self and culture it must be a function of the state to not merely protect individual autonomy, but to protect the culture a well. Cultural defense is self-defense. Of course cultures naturally change over time. The arts are constantly changing as new styles supplant the old. And technology introduces changes to which people must adapt their way of life. These changes are part of the purpose of art and science and are completely natural. But, as against the libertarians and neo-cons, the state must do what it can to protect the cultural heritage of its people; this needs to be secondary in importance only to protecting the physical safety of its people since the destruction of ones cultural heritage is as much an annihilation of the self as death.

Finally, just as our history is our identity, the same goes for other cultures around the world. Interventionist foreign policies that seek to overturn practices grounded on a people’s religion, culture, or history in the name of Western values need to be resisted.

______________________________
1. In practice, however, Personas are conflicted in what they believe. They sometimes believe in Kantian universal rights and freedom, but at other times that values are arbitrary and that to be free is to create your own values.
2. See Millikan, Language: A Biological Model, p. 109.

Another great article by Patrick Deneen

There is another great article by Patrick Deneen over at Postmodern Conservative. Here Mr. Deneen discusses the debate over global warming and the irony of how the sides of the debate have turned out. Here is a taste:

In short, when it comes to the issue of “global warming,” our liberals seem to embrace a conservative stance, while our conservatives appear to evince all the earmarks of liberalism. What gives?

Dare I submit that global warming is not really about global warming – not really? Global warming, it seems to me, is a proxy battle in a larger war, a bit like Vietnam was a proxy war in the greater conflagration of the Cold War. As such, we find ourselves aligned with peculiar allies and defending uncomfortable positions. Indeed, the comparison to Vietnam is not inapt, since Global Warming is now where many of the political and culture wars have now come to rest. It is an issue around which a now-traditional set of ideological divisions have now come to roost – ones that curiously lead our conservatives to hold a deeply unconservative position and our liberals to act illiberally.

The Goodness of Nature

Arguments for environmental protections traditionally fall into two camps. On the one hard there are those who argue for protecting the environment for the benefits such protections give to mankind: that we may find cures for human diseases by exploiting plants and animals, or that future generations of people should have access to the natural resources that contribute to their well-being, or that they should not be denied the experience of enjoying the beauty of nature. We can call these anthropocentric environmental ethics. On the other hand are those who believe that nature is good in itself, separate from any benefit protecting nature may have for humans. We can call these biocentric ethics.

In Respect for Nature, Paul Taylor bases his argument for biocentric environmental morality on the claim that all living things have a “good of their own.” Because of this they have inherent worth and this entails “(1) that the entity is deserving of moral concern an consideration, or, in other words, that it is to be regarded as a moral subject, and (2) that all moral agents have a prima facie duty to promote or preserve the entity’s good as an end in itself and for the sake of the entity whose good it is” (p. 73). People, for example, have a good of their own in that we can speak of the types of things that are good for people, a healthy diet, exercise, etc. On the other hand, it does not make sense to speak of the good of a pile of rocks, sand, mountains, galaxies, atoms, or chemical compounds. It doesn’t make sense to say that a rock’s good is furthered by some action. Plants and animals, on the other hand, Taylor argues, do have a good of their own in that we can speak of what is harmful or beneficial to them, what helps them perform their biological functions, and what harms them. However, environmentalists have never given an explicit theory of what it is to have a good of ones own.

I think that the answer lies in the ground-breaking account of “proper function” given by philosopher Ruth Millikan in Language, Thought, and Other Biological Categories. Basically, to have a feature as a proper function requires that the item was copied from previous ancestors (the way our genes are copied from our parents’ genes for example, or that manufactured items are copies of a prototype) and that it was selected as opposed to other things because it did this thing. And so a hammer has driving nails as a function because it was its ability of its ancestors to drive nails by possessing some particular shape and hardness that caused this hammer get its shape and hardness through our copying these features from its ancestors in manufacture. Similarly, hearts have pumping blood as their function because it is due to that fact that its ancestors pumped blood that has helped account for proliferation of the genes responsible for making hearts.

In The Construction of Social Reality, John Searle criticizes Millikan’s account and writes "the reduction of function to causal notions still leaves out the normative component. Why do we talk of malfunctioning hearts, of heart disease, of better and worse hearts?" (page 18). Searle's answer is that since causal explanations of function can not explain the normative component, causal explanations of function are inadequate. However, this assumes that no naturalistic account of the goodness of functional objects can be provided. The answer is that if an object has a function then it has certain qualities that allow it to perform this function. These qualities are the virtues of the item in question and it is the possession of these virtues, and the resulting ability to perform its function that makes the item in question a good token of that item type. For example, if it is the function of a hammer to put nails into a surface, then a good hammer is one that possesses those features which allow it to do this: the sturdiness, shape, resiliency, and whatever other features are conducive to its end. These are the features that caused the hammer to be selected for reproduction as opposed to items lacking this feature. On the other hand, if the function of the heart is to pump blood, a diseased heart, one which has lost the features which enable it to perform its function, will obviously not be good. The function of hearts is to pump blood and what makes a heart a good one (i.e., its virtues) are those features of hearts that allow them to do this: the strength of the muscle tissue, the pressure it exerts on the blood, etc.. Diseased or malformed hearts are not good because they lack these virtues.

The virtues are the features of an object that caused it to be selected and reproduced rather than some other object lacking those features. Thus virtue, goodness, and the normative properties of functional items is an entirely natural, objective, and common property. And this allows us to explain how biological items have a good of their own as Taylor argues and why rocks, minerals and so forth--things lacking proper functions--do not have a good of their own.

The Humean fact/value distinction is wrong; the world is swimming in natural values.

Conservatism and Culture

There is an excellent article on conservatism and culture by Patrick J Deneen located here. that makes many of the same point I have been making here. Definitely worth a read. Here is a taste:

Growing numbers of social traditionalists (let’s not call them “conservatives,” lest we confuse the issue) are realizing that the coalition they joined was a devil’s bargain. While communism was successfully combated, market capitalism did its work undermining most of the traditions that held together communities, folkways and customs. Communities were undermined by multinationals while elite universities scoured the land for any talent that could be strip-mined from localities and turned into productive material in the international market system. If you weren’t a winner in the cosmopolitan, meritocratic sweepstakes then you deserved some kind of welfare and re-education; the norm of success was defined by one’s distance from traditions and culture. The conservation of liberalism has accelerated the demise of the viability of tradition’s claims. Thus, I, for one, have a jaundiced eye toward the old bargain being offered in some circles: rather, it seems likely that it is time to fight battles with erstwhile allies (even as new alliances are formed with some on the current Left, e.g. those with localist or somewhat healthy environmental views which stress conservation over techno-optimism) rather than sign back on to a lousy bargain that offers to allow us to “conserve” an anti-conservative "tradition."

Libertarianism and Environmentalism

Libertarians condemn environmentalists for urging restrictions of liberty and property rights and see environmental laws as infringements on these rights. But instead libertarians and environmentalists should see that they have a common enemy in environmental destruction, the true cause of the erosion of liberty. Libertarians believe in the absolute protection of life, health, liberty, and property. (Sometimes health is dropped from the list as ones body is considered property, and thus an infringement on ones health is considered a destruction of property.) This system worked fine in early American history where there was plenty of unclaimed land awaiting cultivation. One was always free to provide for oneself by claiming property and working the land. In the Second Treatise of Government, Locke places two conditions of property acquisition: there must be enough quality land left for others, and one can not claim more than one can use. Locke never addresses how population growth could result in a case where there is no longer any unclaimed land left for others and his principle of just acquisition of property is inevitably violated. At some point all the land has been claimed by an owner. It is no longer possible to “light out for the territories” and make a living. At this point it became necessary for people to find employment in order to live.

Up until this point businesses were unregulated and free. After all, if employees were unhappy with their working conditions they were free to make a living off of the land. But once there was no longer available land free for the taking, people no longer had a choice and had to accept whatever employment they could find. It became necessary to put regulations on businesses in order to protect the right to life of the people. For example, employers could not discriminate against their employees if their employees were going to be able to find employment and so be able to live. The right to liberty of the business owner was sacrificed in order to protect the right to life of the people. Government food assistance programs also became necessary to protect the right to life since people were no longer able to provide for themselves through working the land.

To take another example, originally, people and businesses were able to dump their waste into the rivers and air. After all, a person living in relatively isolation can not produce enough waste to affect the rights of other people. However, with population growth enough pollution will soon be being dumped into the water and air that it will begin to affect the health of others. As in the first case, the response will be to limit the rights of some in order to protect the rights of others and to establish new government powers in order to achieve this. Pollution laws come into affect to make sure that the air and water is not being polluted as to harm the health of others. Similarly, eminent domain laws can be used to seize people’s property in order to provide drinking water for growing populations as was done in Massachusetts with the creation of Quabbin reservoir. Here again property rights were sacrificed for others right to health.

Science fiction writers have considered cases where overpopulation and environmental degradation becomes so severe that even the right to life of some is sacrificed to protect the life of others. Thankfully we have not yet reached this point.

All of these examples are the similar in that environmental destruction causes restrictions on the rights to property and liberty. And this is something that Libertarians do not understand, that freedom is an adaptation to environmental conditions. Perfect freedom can only exist in a relatively low population density with many available resources for the sustenance of life. As Hume writes:

Let us suppose, that nature has bestowed on the human race such profuse abundance of all external conveniencies, that, without any uncertainty in the event, without any care or industry on our part, every individual finds himself fully provided with whatever his most voracious appetites can want…

It seems evident, that, in such a happy state, every other social virtue would flourish, and receive tenfold encrease; but the cautious, jealous virtue of justice would never once have been dreamed of. For what purpose make a partition of goods, where everyone has already more than enough? Why give rise to property where there cannot possibly be any injury?
…
We see, even in the present necessitous condition of mankind, that, wherever any benefit is bestowed by nature in an unlimited abundance, we leave it always in common among the whole human race, and make no subdivisions of right and property. Water and air, though the most necessary of all objects, are not challenged as the property of individuals; nor can any man commit injustice by the most lavish use and enjoyment of these blessings.
…
Thus, the rules of equity or justice depend entirely on the particular state and condition, in which men are placed (An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals.)

Of course the irony is that, impossible though it was for Hume to see, air and water now can be the subject of injustice and that we do now possess the capability to foul the air and water sufficiently that their use and misuse can be brought under the purview of justice. But in all cases environmental destruction is the enemy of liberty, not the restrictions that attempt to protect people's rights as far as possible, and in all cases libertarians would best serve their desire for freedom by preventing the environmental conditions that require ever greater extension of the jealous virtue of justice.

Some Thoughts on Culture

I just got back from going to church on Christmas Eve. We sang the traditional songs, recited the familiar passages, reminded ourselves on the familiar lessons. I walked home afterwards and looked at the lights hanging up in town and in people's windows. Settled down next to the Christmas tree to watch It's a Wonderful Life.
If you want to know what a culture is, look to see what behaviors are replicated by the people. Whether it is the yearly replication of activities and songs, or the daily meals, entertainments, employments, and sending children to school. As long as songs, holidays, beliefs, behaviors are being replicated by individuals, and taught to individuals who thereby go on to replicate those behaviors, they are what constitutes a persons culture.

An Argument Against Libertarianism

Suppose there was a race of space aliens that practiced Libertarian political philosophy. These aliens come to Earth and begin to colonize the United States. The aliens are peaceful and respect everyone's rights yet reproduce at an extremely fast rate. In a short time the aliens have colonized the entire country with the indigenous population reduced to a small minority. There are no more baseball or football games, no backyard barbecues, no 4th of July, or Washington's birthday celebrations, no more hot dogs or hamburgers or milk shakes, no more Christmas or American music. (If you are an international reader replace these examples with your own culture's practices.) The aliens go on to bulldoze all the existing buildings and rebuild the country with otherworldly alien-style architecture. The aliens celebrate their holidays and live by their cultural norms for centuries to come.

On the Libertarian understanding, nothing politically horrible has happened. And this is the problem with Libertarianism: Libertarians have no grounds for attachment to or wish to defend their culture. As long as individual rights are respected, Libertarians have no particular grounds to defend American traditions and culture. Furthermore, the inhabitants have no grounds for defending their culture from being displaced, and in fact any attempts to stop the aliens from spreading would be criticized as infringements on the aliens’ rights.

Libertarians can not hold that the aliens ought to assimilate into American culture since Libertarians believe that any infringement of life, liberty, or property is forbidden unless the person has infringed upon someone else's rights. How then can they, for example, be for forcing the aliens to abandon their language? Isn't this an illegitimate infringement on their liberty? After all, they have not infringed upon anyone else's rights and so Libertarians would demand that they should be free to do as they please. Suppose the alien's started their own schools and taught their own history instead of American history in school? On what grounds can a Libertarian be against this? Suppose they decided they wanted to celebrate the birthdays of their great historical figures instead of ours? Suppose they insisted on celebrating the day they landed as their national holiday instead of July 4th? In other words, suppose they decided not to assimilate and simply spread their culture as they displace the indigenous culture. How could a Libertarian be against this? Libertarianism demands that we do nothing to infringe upon the aliens liberty as long as they aren't harming anyone else. What grounds would we have for defending our nation and preventing their arrival at all? Eventually, American culture is gone and replaced by the alien culture and we were prevented by Libertarianism from lifting a finger to prevent it.

To take another example that makes a similar point from a different direction, for a time Native Americans were forced to abandon their cultural heritage and adopt the "white" culture. They were forced to wear western clothes and forbidden from wearing the clothes of their cultural heritage, adopt western religion, celebrate the holidays, and practice the music and art of "white" Americans. Libertarians would see that what is wrong here is that the Native Americans were denied their right to liberty to wear what they wanted, or listen to whatever music they wanted, for example. They would argue against this in the same way they might argue that students at Catholic school should not be required to wear a uniform. But this completely misses the point that the real harm here is that their cultural heritage was annihilated in favor of an alien heritage. Someone who has had their arts, culture, language, and other aspects of their history replaced are bound to feel cultural alienation and inauthenticity of the self. Libertarians can not account for this aspect of the offense.

Conservatism, at heart, springs from the desire to protect from change the things that ought to be preserved. We are used to hearing this as concerns traditional values—conservatives are those who wish to preserve traditional values while liberals urge reform. In the arts, the conservative temperament wishes to preserve existing styles and not adopt the latest flash in the pan (it is also why I think that conservatives ought to be environmentalists as they seek to preserve the beauty of nature).

The protection of ones cultural tradition is a legitimate goal, perhaps the most important goal of the state next to the protection of the physical safely of its citizens. The Native Americans had the right to protect their cultural heritage and resist assimilation. Likewise, protecting the country from colonization by an alien culture is legitimate, protecting ones history, language, celebrations, and morals is legitimate. I feel distress whenever I see modern Asian cities and that they have abandoned the ancient Asian artistic heritage and embraced Western styles so thoroughly. And so I argue that any political philosophy that prevents the defense of these things, such a Libertarianism, is lacking.

What is Wrong with Personas

The term “persona” comes from Jungian psychology. Jung discusses those who identify too closely with their public face or persona, mistaking their public image for their self. “One could say, with a little exaggeration, that the persona is that which in reality one is not, but which oneself as well as others think one is.” (1)

"It is only because the persona represents a more or less arbitrary and fortuitous segment of the collective psyche that we can make the mistake of regarding it in toto as something individual. It is, as its name implies, only a mask of the collective psyche, a mask that feigns individuality, making others and oneself believe that one is individual, whereas one is simply acting a role through which the collective psyche speaks." (2)

I wished to capture the spirit of that idea (but not the rest of Jungian psychology) in my attacks on a strand of thinking and a theory of identity which has become widespread in the world, especially among white, urban, liberals.
The main problem with Personas is that they believe they are free from outside influences and purely self-created individuals and are unaware of the historical origins of the ideas, tastes, and values that constitute the self. They have rejected the notion that there is any kind of causal, historical, or cultural influence on their self, or have come to convince themselves that they have managed to throw off such influences, when in fact all their ideas and values have been formulated by others and inherited by them. Specifically, their ideas are a watered down Nietzschean philosophy or extistentialism where to be free is to be self-creating and uninfluenced by outside ideas. In my post of August 17th, “On Originality and Individuality,” I attacked the notion of any kind of pure originality and individuality. We are all part of an historical heritage, whether we admit it or not, have inherited our ideas and values as passed down through our culture. But the project of modern liberals (and libertarians), that is, Personas, is to strip away any emotional connection to an historical cultural heritage, or identification with any outside influence, whether moral, intellectual, or social. Only then can a person be authentic, free, and individual. The problem is, when you strip away any emotional connection to a historical heritage and any notion of intellectual inheritance, nothing is left except alienation on the Left and will to power on the Right.

Although for the most part, Personas are liberals I am not criticizing what we consider liberal political positions concerning government spending, economics, or foreign policy. In fact my target is not liberals or liberalism at all. Although there is great overlap between liberals and Personas, there are plenty of Personas on the right as well as the left, especially among neo-cons and libertarians. Also, it is possible to hold liberal positions on issues without being a Persona.

Accepting the view that Personahood is the road to freedom results in an embrace of multiculturalism. After all, Personas are free from emotional connections to a cultural heritage or sense of kinship with others based on a common ethnic heritage. Thus all cultures are equal in their eyes and they possess no special loyalty to one culture over another. To Personas, with no emotional attachment to any historical tradition and identifying with no heritage, multiculturalism is like a show put on for their amusement; freed from caring about a particular heritage they are able to consume the world's cultural heritage while being responsible for none.


(1) Jung, The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, p 123.
(2) Jung, The Portable Jung, p. 105.

Multiculturalism and Cultural Destruction

The advocates of multiculturalism claim that they are preserving cultural diversity. They argue that cultural practices are worthy of protection in that they make up much of what we consider the good of life--the celebrations, music, arts, and history that each culture finds important to their sense of self. However, if, say, the island of Japan, were to become 20% Japanese culture, 20% African, 20% Russian, 20% Italian, and 20% Mexican culture, as some of those advocating "cultural diversity" presumably would endorse, it would be a devastating destruction of Japanese culture. It is similar to the case in biology where if a species is being wiped out due to the spread of an invasive species, the world has become less biologically diverse, not more. Likewise, if the territory of Ireland were to similarly lose its culture in the name of "cultural diversity" it would be a catastrophic decimation of Irish culture. The same can be said of any nation that possesses an indigenous culture--multiculturalism is a cause of cultural destruction, not the preservation or protection of a culture.
This is to point out necessity of cultural territory--a land area where a cultural group has sovereignty and is free from invasive cultures--if cultures are to be preserved.

Why environmentalists should be conservatives (and vice versa).

Most articles arguing that conservatives would be better able to protect the environment base their claim on the belief that market forces would do the job of protecting the environment better than government. I don’t believe this to be that case and yet do believe that environmentalists and conservatives have more in common than either side is willing to believe. At root, I believe that they share the same principles. The environmental movement today is based around two main tenets: sustainability, and localization. If I ask which political philosophy more closely embodies those two principles I am lead to the inevitable conclusion that (paleo) conservatives embody them far more than liberals. As far as sustainability goes, unfortunately under the neo-cons, the Republican party is as far from being the party of sustainability as can be. They're now the party of debt, economic growth, fossil fuels, environmental destruction, military intervention, centralized power, and big business. Despite this, I actually think there is more hope for the Republicans to be the party of sustainability. The old school Republicans were as wary of big business as they were of big government, they were the ones who were for local businesses, were in favor of environmental protections, were for localizing political power, were noninterventionists, and were fiscal conservatives. There are still some of these around that might make a resurgence. I see nothing of the sort possible with the Democrats, who are far from the sustainability party as well. Despite being more open to passing laws protecting the environment, Democrats are the party of unchecked, unsustainable population growth, economic growth, widespread military deployments, and government spending. But more importantly, the Democratic party is the party of centralized political power, not localization. This is not to claim that environmentalists should be the accursed neo-cons. Rather that they should be paleo-cons, or perhaps crunchy-cons (see http://blog.beliefnet.com/crunchycon/ ).

To turn the issue around and see why conservatives in turn should be environmentalists, I would like to argue that the root instinct behind conservatism is desire to protect from change the things that ought to be preserved. We are accustomed to thinking this way when it comes to traditional values--conservatives are those who wish to maintain the traditional ways thinking that they believe are still valuable and ought to be preserved--while liberals urge reform. In the arts, the conservative temperament is that existing styles are good and ought not be abandoned for the latest flash in the pan. James Howard Kunstler and the rest of the New Urbanists fall into this category as far as architecture is concerned. Likewise, the environmental movement is based on the conservative impulse that the beauty of nature ought to be protected. In all of these areas the conservative impulse is the urge to protect something good from destruction, whether values, or art, or the environment.
Finally, on a purely practical note, given the recent electoral defeats of the Republican party, they desperately need to attract a new constituency. The Democratic party is primarily made up of minority groups, consumer advocacy groups, lawyers, and environmentalists. If Republicans want to widen their base, which of these groups would be easiest to attract? Clearly it is environmentalists who a would be easiest and most likely to be attracted to a conservative message.

What is Race?

I am currently reading Multiculturalism and Political Theory and I wanted to quickly comment on something I came across. In the social sciences these days it is common to see the claim that there is no such thing as race and that it is purely a social construct. For example, Charles Mills points out in “Multiculturalism as/and/or Anti-racism” that “”race” is itself now taken to be non-existent.”(1) The argument for this position points out that there are no morphological or genetic traits that all purported members of a race possess. For example, it is still common to hear people discussing race as skin color. When discussing a recent affirmative action case before the U.S. Supreme Court, justice Anthony Kennedy stated “the question is whether or not you can get into the school that you really prefer. And in some cases that depends solely on skin color [emphasis mine].” The argument of those who deny the existence of race rightly point out that for any purported defining racial characteristic--skin color for example--it is possible to produce counterexamples of people who allegedly belong to a race yet lack that characteristic. The same goes for an account that defines race as the possession of some genetic trait, a “race gene”. For example, Ian F. Haney Lopez writes:
"There are no genetic characteristics possessed by all Blacks but not by non- Blacks; similarly, there is no gene or cluster of genes common to all Whites but not to non-Whites. One's race is not determined by a single gene or gene cluster, as is, for example, sickle cell anemia. Nor are races marked by important differences in gene frequencies, the rates of appearance of certain gene types. The data compiled by various scientists demonstrates, contrary to popular opinion, that intra-group differences exceed inter-group differences. That is, greater genetic variation exists within the populations typically labeled Black and White than between these populations. This finding refutes the supposition that racial divisions reflect fundamental genetic differences." (http://academic.udayton.edu/Race/01race/race.htm).

Since there are no essential common morphological or genetic characteristics that are shared by all purported members of a race it is concluded that either race doesn't exist or that it is merely a social contruct.

Unnoticed in the social sciences, there has been a similar debate in the philosophy of biology over the fact that there are no morphological or genetic traits that all hearts, or kidneys, or any other biological items possess. But of course it would be absurd to conclude that therefore no hearts or lungs or kidneys exist. The answer is that biological items are categorized by their history, not by the possession of a trait. For example, not all hearts have four chambers or even pump blood. Certainly diseased ones or dead ones don't. What makes something a heart is that its function is to pump blood, whether or not it currently can or does, and something gets a function by having a certain evolutionary history, i.e., being selected by natural selection for the features that pump blood, and then being copied from your parents' hearts through ones genes.(2) Likewise, race is the possession of a history; race records the history of the migrations of people around the world from the original migration out of Africa. In your race you wear the history of your ancestors on your sleeve, as it were.
As discussed in my previous post, it is clear that race is an “historical kind.” It is not uncommon for historical kinds to lack some feature generally found among that kind. Broken televisions that can't display a picture, diseased hearts that can't pump blood, incorrect performances of Beethoven's 5th Symphony, are no less cases of what they are copies of simply by the lack of some stereotypical feature. And so the argument from counterexamples does not apply here as it would if it were claimed that race was an eternal kind. The fact that race is an historical kind makes it no less or objective a phenomena.
This is of course not to claim that how we categorize people into races, and what categories we accept as valid is not a political and cultural act as it surely is.
(1) In Multiculturalism and Political Theory, p. 93.
(2) See Millikan, Ruth, “Propensities, Exaptations, and the Brain,” in White Queen Psychology and Other Essays for Alice.

The Atomic Self and the Historical Self

In his Second Meditation Descartes asks what sort of thing are we essentially?

“Of course, my conception of myself differs from my conception of a stone in that I think of myself as a thinking and unextended thing while I think of the stone as an extended and unthinking thing. But, when I conceive the stone as a substance (this is, as something that can exist by itself), my understanding of substance seems to be the same as when I conceive of myself as a substance.”

This notion of the self as an essentially thinking and unextended thing constitutes what we can call the “atomic self.” It would be impossible to exaggerate the influence these considerations have had on Western thought. Politically, these considerations on the nature of the self laid the foundations for all of Western nations’ notions of individual rights, the point being that people can not be denied the exercise of their essential nature. Since it is our essential nature to think, our essential rights are those of speech, religion, conscience, and the freedom to pursue the results of our mental conceptions. Moreover, the self is isolated from all others and so owes nothing to others except respect of the exercise of the others’ rights and is entitled to nothing from others except the same respect.

Ultimately, the notion that a person was an absolutely isolated and distinct substance has lead to the hyperindividualistic society we have today, as discussed in Harvard researcher Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone, where one is isolated from all others, where one is responsible only for oneself, where interpersonal group membership is on the wane, where fellowship is a vice, where solipsism is the highest virtue. Hyperindividualism among the Right has manifested itself in the neo-cons position that one should be responsible only for oneself and that one owes nothing to others. Among the Left it has created the Personas who feel loyalty to none, kinship to none, and owe allegiance to none.

This classic philosophical understanding of the self ran into many insoluble problems. These mostly resolved around the interaction between the mental and physical substances (the mind/body problem), and our increased understanding of the functioning of the brain.

Today there is a new understanding of the types of things that exist and the nature of the self. Philosopher Ruth Millikan, for example, divides the world into 3 types of things:
“Substances fall into at least three basic sorts, which I call ‘historical kinds,’ ‘eternal kinds,’ and ‘individuals.’ (Millikan, Language: A Biological Model, p. 109.)
Historical kinds are groups of individuals that have been copied from each other or a common ancestor for a functional reason. Biological categories such as organs are examples of this catogory, but so are behaviors, language, arts, food, and race. Basically, any living thing and its behaviors fall under this category. Manufactured objects, for example, are generally copies of some prototype and the objects are copied along this design because this allows them to perform some function. Most human behavior falls into this category as well: each time I turn on lamp by flipping the switch is a copy of that behavior and the reason I keep copying that behavior is because it serves the function of fulfilling my desire to illuminate the room.

Eternal kinds are things like atomic elements, chemical compounds, particles, planets, stars and the like. They possess some common nature and are similar because of it, not because they are copies of some common ancestor.
Finally, there are the individuals which are members of either historical or eternal kinds.
It is important to note that for Descartes are the rest of Enlightenment philosophy, there was no such thing as historical kinds. For them, there existed only mental or physical substances, both of which, I suppose, you could say were eternal kinds.

So let us ask, on this modern understanding what kind of thing is the self? It seems clear that the mass of ideas, perceptions, and values that make up the self mark it as an historical kind. As I have argued previously, most of our ideas and values are copies of previous ideas and values; they are copied to us through the education we receive from our parents and schools. Like historical kinds, and unlike eternal kinds, ideas and values can change over time as each episode of copying is liable to introduce changes to the ideas and values that are being replicated. We can call this conception of the self the “historical self.”

The next question to ask is, since our existing political system is the result of our belief in the atomic self, how ought it change based on our modern understanding of the self? I will turn to this in future postings.

What Culture Am I?

One of the first questions I would think one would ask when confronted by multiculturalism would be to ask, if we are to adopt multiculturalism, then what culture am I? Once you figure out what that is, the question would be, what does it mean to say that culture X is my culture? To be part of a culture is be part of a historical pattern of inheriting copies of values, traditions, celebrations, and art forms. To take celebrations as an example, traditional celebration behaviors are copied year after year, and like genes that are copied generation after generation, mutations are introduced which gradually alter the tradition. The way Christmas is celebrated today is very different from how it was celebrated in the past. Some cultures can remain very unchanging for centuries (usually where external cultures—“invasive species”--do not intervene), whereas others change rapidly under the influence of new ideas. Despite the changes that occur over time, to be part of a culture is to be part of the copy-chain, to be one who participates in replicating the tradition.

On Originality and Individuality

In my previous post of May 12 I stated that cultures are idea copy-chains. I mentioned in passing that the ideas are sometimes altered before they are passed down. I now wish to say some more about what this altering entails. For example, scientific “progress” is the result of altering our received ideas about the nature of the world. Ideas are tested and if found wanting altered before being passed on to be replicated to other scientists and the general public. The altered scientific ideas are “better” than the existing ones if they offer a better explanation for the nature of the universe. What exactly makes a scientific explanation better than a competing explanation is a much debated topic in the philosophy of science. Often scientists can not decide between competing theories for decades until some new piece of evidence becomes available.

In art it is even more difficult to determine why certain styles are adopted among all the competing designs and come to be the dominant style of the time. The world is full of art that either gets no attention, or perhaps explodes like an algae bloom in temporary popularity only to disappear and leave no lasting influence. It is the great artists and philosophers who manage to produce new branches of ideas that lay the path to all future ideas. Success in altering the existing ideas requires a great understanding of the existing ideas. It is only through a passionate study of the existing ideas that the proper perspective can be achieved whereby one is in a position to know their strengths and weaknesses, to see what is lacking, and to offer a new way. The world is full of tragicomic “artists” throwing up new ideas without any real understanding of the existing ideas and without offering any real solutions. Often they make the same error in confusing originality and individuality with uniqueness. Any artist can throw paint of a canvas in a unique pattern, or put pieces of cloth together in a unique garment, or put bricks together in a unique way, but none of this constitutes originality which always builds upon a foundation of existing ideas.

This is the nature of originality and individuality: to alter ones received ideas and to have them successfully replicated; the great individuals are those who manage to produce the theories, art, or values that manage to be widely replicated. But even in these cases it would be wrong to say that there is true originality. In each of these cases, the existing ideas are examined, altered, and then replicated, but all such originality is built on the foundation of the existing ideas. Even artistic geniuses like Picasso or Le Corbusier who produced radically original architecture that was a drastic departure from the existing styles, and managed to become wildly influential and have his ideas widely replicated, started out by copying existing ideas and then altering them (in his case it was existing concrete military bunkers that served as inspiration). Who would have thought that concrete bunkers would be the source of the great and influential architecture? It is often stunning in hindsight to find out which ideas are those that burst onto “the scene” and become widely replicated after struggling for ages in anonymity like the mammals existing in the times of the dinosaurs.
There are those however who fail to see for one reason or another that their tastes and moral ideas are mere copies of existing ideas. They are horribly self-congratulatory whereas a deep reverence for ones ancestors and a modesty concerning ones achievement is the proper attitude. Scientists seem to be the best at understanding that they stand on the shoulders of giants and to have modesty concerning their own achievements. It is those whom I have called the Personas who are most guilty of this offense. Personas have thrown away any personal connection to their historical tradition and think that their ideas are acts of pure originality. If their ideas and values are purely the result of their own efforts, and they are thus free from any outside influence, they reason, there is no need to feel any connection to a cultural tradition. They are arrogantly smug about their supposed originality and fail to see that their ideas are purely inherited and their character purely determined. Instead of seeing their place as a member of a cultural tradition with a deep reverence for those who have formed the ideas and made the sacrifices that make up the content of their self, they feel they are purely individual and free from all outside influence, that they have created their own ideas a priori. But even worse, Personas feel no impetus to improve their inherited ideas as they see them as correct and eternal. They may wish to educate others about the faults in their ideas, although they seem to prefer to condescendingly humor them, but their own ideas are in no such need of examination or improvement.
Personas believe that to be free is to be the creator of ones own ideas and to not have ones ideas caused by outside influence. This is what it means to be an individual, to not have received ideas but to have created ones own ideas. Since they desire to be have such freedom, or at least have come to think it is "cool", they act as if they are free from outside cultural influence and have created their own ideas. This is similar to the philosophy of Nietzsche who argued for such a self-invented individuality. But instead what we find with the Personas is a worst-case scenario of those who have inherited their ideas and values, but act as if they have created these things themselves, who ignorantly feel no connection to a historical heritage, who feel no gratitude, pride, or debt to their ancestors.

When History Results in Opposing Lessons

One theme I have been stressing here is that cultures are histories, and that the values of a culture are the results of the lessons learned from these histories. Thus, different histories result in different cultures and different values. For example, for generations Americans had fresh in their mind the abuses of centralized power by European monarchs and developed a set of values that sought at all times to prevent similar abuses here. The US Constitution as the embodiment of the lessons of the abuses of centralized authority diffused power between the branches of government and the states in order to prevent too much concentrated power. This decentralized model required that the individual be given extraordinary responsibility for their welfare and not depend on the government. This tradition still lives on in certain conservative political thinking in the nation, especially among Libertarians.
African-Americans, on the other hand, have learned very different lessons from their history. The Civil War, court-ordered desegregation, and the Civil Rights movement were all actions taken by the central government and so this history teaches one to appreciate centralized power's ability to protect oppressed minorities and to look for centralized authority to overrule local decision-making. African-Americans have always been supporters of the party of centralized power, the Republicans in the decades after the Civil War, and Democrats since the New Deal and the Civil Rights movement.
The question then is what to do when different histories result in different values? Is one side right and the other wrong? Of course not. But sadly, each side hurls moral censure at the others: African-Americans accuse those seeking to limit the powers of centralized authority of racism, conservatives insult those seeking to strengthen the power of the state as being hostile to freedom and personal responsibility.
I would argue that people should have a right to their history, to live out the values of their culture, to be free to live according to the dictates of ones heritage. The answer is to allow political autonomy for distinct historical traditions, i.e., communitarianism.

Why Some Values are Successful

The question of why certain values become adopted and replicated through generations whereas others fail to become adopted is a fascinating one. It seems like there is no one factor determining the success or failure of a new value and that each one has its own individual story. I am not so idealistic or a Social Darwinist as to believe that the reason one value displaces another is that the new value is somehow objectively "better," but it seems as if the common thread among the cases of new values taking hold is widespread dissatisfaction and people seeking a new path, although often the people can not even imagine that a different way of doing things is possible before they are introduced to a new set of values. For example, perhaps the most amazing story in human history is the spread of Christian values from their origin with Christ and his small group of followers. From such humble origins one would be entirely justified in believing that they would fail to gain traction and would quickly go extinct. There are many prophets in the world proposing we abandon our evil ways and adopt new values who never manage to get their ideas replicated. Instead, in this case there was such widespread dissatisfaction among the downtrodden with Roman values that the new Christian ones, which inverted most of the existing Roman values, found fertile soil. The old Roman values had served well when Rome was growing and traits like valor and honor and power were needed. These allowed Rome to grow from an unremarkable city-state to the empire it became. But it also reduced many to second-class status and this change in circumstance left them receptive to the message of Christianity.

The quick abandonment of traditional sexual mores is another example where new values quickly took hold and spread. The introduction of cheap and effective contraceptives worked like an invasive species introduced into a new environment and quickly drove the old sexual values to the brink of extinction. The old sexual mores of pre-marital abstinence and marital fidelity worked well in a world rampant with sexual disease and which lacked effective contraceptives and treatments. These were quickly abandoned once penicillin, “the pill,” and cheap and effective condoms arrived. In their place arose the new set of sexual values we have today. In contrast to these cases of voluntary adoption of new values, Communist Russia attempted to enforce their values on the conquered countries of Eastern Europe and met with some success for 50 years, but these values were abandoned as soon as the threat of repression had lessened.

The comparison to invasive species is apt. In all cases a new factor is introduced into an alien environment and if the environment is favorable, manages to replicate itself quickly. Environmentalists have been urging people to change their values for some time, with middling success. If their more dire warning come to pass, i.e., if the environment changes, they may suddenly find a set of conditions whereby their message gains more traction. Moral invocations themselves seldom manage to change behavior, it is always a change in environment which makes people receptive to new ideas. For example, classical liberalism had served the United States well from its inception, but by the start of the 20th century had resulted in a Gilded Age of vast wealth for some and widespread poverty for many. The Great Depression provided the opening for the advocates of the centralized welfare state who had been agitating for decades to see their values finally adopted. As I argued in my last post, values are always the result of such historical events.

I sense that we are again in a time where there is growing dissatisfaction with the status quo and that a new set of values is waiting in the wings and will begin to take hold. I argue that decentralization and localization and sustainability will encompass these new values that will replace the centralized welfare state.

The Origin of Values

It used to be that the United States did not have a standing army. The Founding Fathers were terrified by the history of standing armies and in their writings endlessly warned against the dangers standing armies posed to liberty:

"What, Sir, is the use of a militia? It is to prevent the establishment of a standing army, the bane of liberty....” -- Elbridge Gerry

"...but if circumstances should at any time oblige the government to form an army of any magnitude, that army can never be formidable to the liberties of the people, while there is a large body of citizens, little if at all inferior to them in discipline and use of arms, who stand ready to defend their rights..." --Alexander Hamilton

“A standing army is one of the greatest mischief that can possibly happen” –James Madison

When faced with a war, the nation would raise an army from volunteers, and then disband it once hostilities had ceased. The distrust of standing armies was one of the most characteristic of American values. This all changed with World War II where the nation suddenly adopted the new value of supporting standing armies. The threat from the Soviet Union, in light of the lessons of Pearl Harbor and the desire not to be caught unprepared in the event of sudden attack changed the nation’s values.

In all cases where one wishes to understand the origin of a value in an individual or a people you can trace the value to an historical event. They are not always as sudden and dramatic as Pearl Harbor, many times the value is fought over for decades with words and often arms before the new value is adopted, but it is always history that determines the adoption of a new value. The values enshrined in the US Constitution embody the lessons learned about the abuse of power by centuries of European monarchs.

In contrast to this view, it is often thought or assumed that values are apprehended a priori, that they are written in the structure of the universe and are apprehended by pure reason rather than learned through the bitter lessons of history. Western nations, under the continuing influence of Kant, are one and all in the sway of this view. This results in the continuing inability of westerners to understand cultures whose history has taught them very different lessons (or even the inability for one western nation to understand another). After all, if morality is a priori, and thus universal, all of humanity must concede to identical values. Much of our continuing conflict with Middle Eastern countries comes from this misunderstanding—we simply can not understand how they could fail to adapt western values when they are so obvious. But of course, these values are anything but obvious and what we now think of as “Western values” had an extremely painful birth in the previous centuries where they were often conceived in conflict, born in bloodshed, and nursed through many devastating wars before emerging today where we assume they should be obvious to all.

This is not to suggest that values always spread as the result of bloodshed, only that it is not obvious beforehand which values ought to be adopted.

Getting over history

When the United States decided to split Kosovo off from Serbia and give it to the Albanians it set off riots throughout Serbia. The Serbians see Kosovo as the heartland of Serbia based on the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 where Serbs battled the Ottoman empire and lost. The battle has ever since been a source of great national patriotism for Serbs who see it is perhaps, on an American analogy, to the Alamo, or perhaps Bunker Hill, or Pearl Harbor. In response to the riots, Condoleeza Rice urged the angry Serbs to get over it. "I mean, after all, we're talking about something from 1389 - 1389! It's time to move forward."
The Serbs could have replied that African-Americans should get over slavery.
Or that the south should get over the Civil War.
Or that Jews should get over the holocaust, or those at the Wailing Wall should get over the destruction of the temple, or that they should get over being slaves in Egypt.
Or that the 3rd world should get over imperialism.
Or that the United States should get over the American Revolution, or World War 2.

For all people, their history is their identity, it is what makes you who you are. There is no getting over history.

The American Conservative on localization

There are a couple of interesting articles on localization and sustainability that make similar points to what I have been arguing for here: that localization and sustainability are bedrock conservative principles, and that conservatives should recognize this and embrace these movements. Hopefully a new political coalition can arise that merges the virtues and avoids the vices of both sides of the current political stalemate.
Check it out here:
http://www.amconmag.com/

Two Views of National Identity

There are two images of what it is to be an American, or really any national identity that is struggling with multiculturalism. One view is what I will call the “historical view.” It is to see your values and identity as shaped by American history, to feel that you are a part of the historical chain whereby America is the place that was settled at Plymouth and Jamestown, where the first patriots fought for independence, founded by the Founding Fathers, split by civil war, where the pioneers set out across the prairie, where freedom was defended against fascism and communism. This view of what it is to be an American is not to simply acknowledge these things as facts, or to say that America is merely the place where these things happened. Rather it is to say that to be an American means to see these facts as your history, that these are the things that happened to your people, that your principles and values--your very self--were forged from these events. You take attacks or slights against this story personally; you are proud of the triumphs, and ashamed of its failings. It is to feel that these are the things that we Americans did. Or perhaps you see America as the land where the slavers came from, that abducted your ancestors, brought them here in chains, kept them in slavery for centuries, until freed by the Civil War, only to fall prey to a century of segregation. Both viewpoints, and others besides, encompass what I am here calling the historical view since one sees ones identity as being defined by a historical heritage.

The second image of what it is to be an American is the “principle view.” And this is to say that being an American means believing in certain principles: freedom of speech, religion, democracy, and private property. Americans are the new people, those with no historical baggage, purely individuals rather than a people, possessing no history, no race, no religion, no ancestry, free rather than forged, self-created and perpetually self-creating. For much of American history these two views went together, American history and American principles were inseparable; coming to have the principles of America was the result of identifying with American history, seeing American history as your history resulted in having American principles. It was never imagined that these two views could be separated; of course being an American meant seeing yourself as the heir of and identifying with American history, to see the accomplishments of historical figures not as something that “they” did, the way that one sees, say, French history as something “they” did, but to see it as something “we” did. American principles are the result of learning the lessons of American history.

Originally, however, these two views of what it is to be an American were separate. Each state saw their histories as separate and saw themselves as separate peoples. The Puritans in New England, the Quakers in Pennsylvania, and so on for the other states, each identified with different histories. People saw themselves not as Americans, but as Virginians, New Yorkers, etc. and were proud of their distinct historical heritage. “American principles” were seen as the rules by which these separate peoples would interact, but these principles did not form their identity. In the decades after the Civil War, and especially after World War I, the two views slowly came together (although Southeners and Northeners identified with a different history and thus adopted somewhat different political principles as a result of the Civil War) until a common identity had pretty much formed by the end of World War 2. Of course, African-Americans and Native-Americans never identified with this history and saw their identity as the result of very different histories and learned very different lessons as a result.

Multiculturalism is the attempt to pull these two views apart; cultural integration, in contrast, is the attempt to keep these two views together. As I argued previously, integration has failed because it requires the adoption of a common history. Malcolm X famously derided attempts at integration on the grounds that African-American history was very different from European-Americans and it was not only pointless but cruel to attempt to cause African-Americans to adopt a false and alien history.

I have mentioned in previous posts there are two types of multiculturalists, this current discussion allows us to identify them and see their differences more clearly. On the one hand, there are those who maintain the historical view of identity but seek to allow those who identify with various histories to be Americans. Many African-Americans, for example, following the example of Malcolm X could still be said to support the historical view of identity because he urged African-Americans to identify with their distinct history. This approach attempts to separate the two views of what it means to be an American but continues to allow one to identify with ones history. In many ways this is a throwback to the earlier conception of American identity I discussed where the various colonies identified with various histories, and American principles were rules by which the various groups interact.

However, there is a second form of multiculturalism that is something entirely new. What is new here is the attempt to adopt the principle view, not as rules for interactions between various groups, but as a theory of self-identity. Under this view of multiculturalism, you have no personal interest or emotional attachment to any specific American history, you do not need to see any history as your history. This is what it means to be what I have called a “Persona.” Personas, who are mostly white liberals, although there are many conservative Personas as well, mostly among neo-cons and Libertarians, identify with no history, feel no emotional attachment to a historical tradition, feel no loyalty or obligations, and see their identity entirely as a function of their lifestyle or profession. Personas are hyper-individualistic, identify with no historical ethnic group (although they identify instead with political groups), and evaluate, judge, and feel kinship with people based on their common tastes in music, art, fashion, and politics. They possess an elitist snobbery against those whose tastes are deemed unworthy (contrast this snobbery with the 19th century snobbery based on genealogy.) Although Personas decry racism, they are very different from, say, African-Americans who honor the sacrifices and struggles of their ancestors. Personas feel no such affinity for their ancestors. In fact, Personas probably feel that it is racist to identify so closely with ones ancestors (which puts them in the awkward position of not knowing whether to approve of other racial groups feeling such an affinity). To Personas, with no emotional attachment to any historical tradition and identifyng with no heritage, multiculturalism is like a show put on for their amusement; freed from caring about a particular heritage they are able to consume all the world's cultural heritage while being responsible for none.

Much of the split between Liberals and Conservatives is the result of the clash over these two conceptions of what it is to be an American.

Democrats and cultural diversity

The Democratic party likes to think of itself as the party of cultural diversity. But Barak Obama’s recent remarks on blue-collar rural whites who cling to their guns, pick-up trucks, and religion reveal what everyone already knew: that certain cultures are certainly more equal than others in the eyes of liberals and that their rhetoric on the wonders of diversity is a joke. Cultural diversity is fine to liberals as long as everyone is an urban, upper middle-class, politically-correct liberal.

The Democratic party is the party of strong centralized power (unfortunately, under Bush and the neo-cons, the Republican party has also become the party of centralized power). The question I’d like to address is whether believing in strong centralized power is compatible with believing in cultural diversity. The Democrats are certainly willing to resort to centralized power to clamp down on any cultural practice they do not agree with, whereas those who truly believe in decentralized power are the ones who you would think would be most prepared to allow cultural diversity and self-determination of local communities as long as their community is granted the same respect. And so the Democrats claims to support cultural diversity is incompatible with their commitment to centralized power; centralized power has always been the enemy of cultural diversity.
In my last post I argued that cultures are idea copy-chains. And so the question is, where does the decentralized power idea copy-chain originate? I believe it is fair to say that if you wanted to understand the small government tradition in American politics, you can not ignore the fact that the current bearers of the decenralized authority tradition, the Republican party, has demographics that are overwhelmingly Protestant. Protestantism’s raison d’etre is to resist centralized power (there are interesting historical reasons for the Protestant denominations that remain Democratic, mostly due, I’d argue, to the Civil War and the way the North needed to support the centralized Federal government.) So the question is, are the parties purely representatives of political philosophies, or are they to a great extent cultures with long cultural traditions? Can political philosophy and culture be separated? And so, what is to be made of the calls from the Left for cultural diversity? Does the Left's demands for cultural diversity implicitly allow self-determination for those whose cultures emphasize de-centralized, i.e., Republican, authority?

What is it to have a culture?

Cultures are idea copy-chains. Under "idea" I include beliefs, behaviors, art, and morals. Over time, ideas are copied, sometimes altered, and then passed down through generations. This is a very different conception of culture from those who define a culture as a set of beliefs and customs. In this way it makes sense to speak of "Western culture" despite the fact that what today constitutes Western culture is very different from any other historical period. Western culture is a copy-chain descending from the Greeks, and even though what we call Western culture today is very different from the beliefs, morals, art, and behavior of the Greeks, our ideas originated from them and have been copied and modified through the various historical eras of the Romans, Middle Ages, Renaissance, and the Enlightenment in a chain leading back to them. The chains do branch however (sorry for the mixed metaphor). And although, say, American culture and French culture are very different, they both are branches of the tree that started with the Greeks and are thus both part of the Western heritage. (I am aware that the Greeks also inherited the ideas they revolutionarily altered.) To have a culture is to have your ideas, beliefs, arts, and morals be the latest link in a copy-chain and to acknowledge that your identity is the result of this chain. Because of this, rather than saying that people have a culture, it makes more sense to say that people are part of their culture, or better yet embody their culture.

Our bodies are copy-chains as well, but here it is our genes that are inherited, sometimes altered, and then passed down through generations. Until recently, having a culture was to have your family lineage be part of the biological copy-chain that was the means by which ideas were passed down--the biological copy-chain, and the idea copy-chain followed the same path. Your heritage was your identity as all your beliefs, possessions, values, arts, and religion, even your body, in short, everything about you, was the result of your historical heritage. Thus people valued and honored the customs and heritage as well as the tragedies and triumphs of their ancestors. It made sense to say that "we" suffered the defeats, or that "we" enjoyed the triumphs of our ancestors in the sense that we are a link in the great copy-chain that traces back to our ancestors and defines who we are. For example, in the United States you will hear that "we" defeated the British, the Germans, and the Communists when strictly speaking, very few living people did any of these things.

Today, there is a revolutionary change occurring worldwide where many people do not identify with the culture of their ancestors and do not value the heritage passed down to them. Many cultural traditions are dying out as people willingly abandon their heritage and adopt Western ideas. Even in Western countries, many people, those I have called the "Personas," feel no connection to any cultural heritage and feed off the cultural heritage of others who have not yet abandoned their culture. I can't help but feel that a backlash will develop at some point where people look to rediscover their cultural heritage and sense of identity. There will be an envy of those who retain a traditional heritage and cultural identity. Those who abandoned their heritage will feel the emptiness of feeling no emotional connection to their heritage and will look to rediscover what was carelessly thrown away.

Four Phases of Multiculturalism

1. Integration rejection. Multiculturalism started as a reaction against integration. The guiding thought was that minority cultures shouldn’t have to abandon their cultural heritage in order to integrate into the majority. Instead they should be able to retain their distinctive culture and cultural identity.
2. Two-tiered multiculturalism. Minority cultures no longer feel the need to integrate and instead live according to their heritage and cultural distinctiveness. A two-tiered system arises where the majority culture is still expected to practice the ethics of integration, but minority cultures adopt the ethics of multiculturalism.
3. Multicultural separation. The dominant culture comes to believe that it is unfair to have a dual standard where the minority makes increasing demands for accommodation from the majority, and the majority is expected to acquiesce at the cost of their own cultural norms. The majority embraces multiculturalism in the sense that they demand that their culture be treated equally to others. They withdraw inwardly and look to rediscover the virtues and distinctiveness of their own cultural heritage.
4. Political autonomy. The demand for cultural integrity gives way to demands for political autonomy. The thought being that cultural integrity can not be ensured where there is no political power to order affairs as they see fit.

Types of diversity

Multiculturalism generally takes the view that diversity is its highest value and end. But there are many types of diversity and what type of diversity the champions of multiculturalism have in mind is never specified. For example, if every street on Earth consisted of a German protestant, a Russian Jew, an African American, a Mexican, a Liberian, Japanese, Mongolese, Sikh, Shiite, Sunni, Italian, etc., in one sense it would be diverse, but in another sense it would be entirely homogenous because every place on Earth would be like every other place. This problem runs through almost every model of diversity—as soon as you advocate a type of diversity to be adopted, if EVERYONE adopts it you end up with every place being the same as every other place. In America, suppose each city consisted in equal numbers of the major ethnic groups: suppose every city was 20% white, 20% African American, 20% Latino, 20% Asian, and 20% Native American. In one sense this would be diverse, but in another it would be entirely homogenous in that every city is exactly like every other city. So if we want to avoid this type of homogeny, which I assume the lovers of diversity and enemies of homogeny would, should we then allow certain places to be entirely homogenous? The point of this discussion is to show how meaningless and wishy-washy most discussions of "diversity" are; it is assumed that we know what we are talking about, but what that is is never specified.

There is also the problem with what type of diversity should be emphasized. Racial? Religious? Ethnic? Political? It is always assumed that it is racial diversity that is at issue, but why should racial diversity be more important than religious? If it was religious diversity that was being emphasized should each city be 25% Christian, 25% Jew, 25% Muslim, and 25% Hindu (ignoring atheists and other minor religions). In this case, racial diversity has been sacrificed for religious and ignores the question whether Catholics and Protestants should be treated separately and what to do with the many Protestant denominations. The same question would arise whether we should be emphasizing cultural diversity rather than religious or racial. But it also has the same problem mentioned above that the country would not be diverse since every city would be exactly like every other city, i.e., why should micro diversity be more important than macro? And even if we decide to pick the macro-level diversity, where there are cities or states that are ethnically/culturally/racially/religiously homogenous, are we suggesting that every country should be like this, resulting in homogeneity on a worldwide level?

It seems to me that in order to have the greatest diversity on a worldwide scale would be to have as many distinct, autonomous, races, religions, and cultures as possible, but that within each of these cultural groups, they would be homogenous. But then we are confronted with the question of whether these cultures should all exist in equal numbers. Again, if all cultures are identical in their population sizes, we again have homogeneity rather than diversity. So again it seems like we should have a diversity of population sizes among the different cultures. For example, China with its enormous population on one end and indigenous South American tribes with their small population sizes on the other. This high level of racial, cultural, and religious diversity is exactly what the world used to be like BEFORE homogenizing modernist unversality and equally homogenizing multiculturalism came along.

Can culture be separated from ethics?

One of the foundations of multiculturalism is that there is a base of universal human rights that forbids sexism, racism, homophobia, and religious intolerance. On top of this sits culture, which on the multicultural understanding, basically amounts to the arts, celebrations, and food. And so cultural diversity is allowed, as long as the ethics are correct. But can culture and ethics be separated in this way? Just consider how, say, sexual ethics informs the music of a distinct culture, from the radically unmusical religion of the Puritans, to the sexually charged music of hip-hop. Or consider how different dance styles reflect the ethics of that culture. Ethics pervades every aspect of culture and can not be separated out as multiculturalism thinks. A culture’s attitude towards women, power, class, and every other ethical more will pervade the art that is produced by that culture. Art can not be separated from ethics as multiculturalism holds. It is possible to strip the ethical content from art, and wed it to a different ethic, but it thereby kills it and turns it into style, not art.

Why integration has failed

All countries that have attempted to integrate racial minorities have ended up with persistent segregation and its resulting social problems. In the United States for example, the facts are startling: 43 years after Brown v. Board of Education, schools are more segregated than ever, neighborhoods more homogenous, African-Americans are returning to the south in record numbers and creating distinct communities, white flight continues unabated. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam has documented how cultural diversity leads to less civil engagement, more isolation, and more alienation. In France, riots plague the ethnic enclaves, in England there are now ethnic "no-go" zones where it is dangerous for people of the wrong race to pass, in Australia deep segregation exists between the aboriginal Australian's and white Australians, in Sri Lanka ethnic war exists between the Tamils and the Sinhalese. Further examples could be produced ad nauseum. To understand why integration has failed we must understand how it was supposed to work in the first place.

Integration:
The United States and all western nations are founded on the Enlightenment view descended from Descartes that each individual is a distinct separate substance. This substance was essentially rational, and could over time acquire various beliefs, desires, etc. In this way it was believed that everything about an individual—sex, race, height, weight, religious and political beliefs—everything except for its rationality was merely contingent upon accident and/or personal experience. Specifically, the individual was born a tabula rasa (although Descartes thought there were some innate ideas) that could be provided with experiences that would form ones beliefs and character. It was presumed that if two individuals were provided with the same experiences, they would possess the same beliefs and character. Acting on these premises, the civil rights movement in the United States and similar social movements in other countries thus had two aims: to remove segregation on the one hand, and foster integration on the other. Integration was supposed to work by providing equal experiences and removing the differences that resulted in a lack of equality and thus prejudice and segregation. After all, on the Cartesian model, by giving all individuals identical experiences, or as closely identical as possible, we would remove cultural differences and result in an integrated culture. For example, bussing was an attempt to provide all citizens with the same educational experiences, a well as exposure to individuals of different races, in order to dispel prejudices resulting from ignorance due to a lack of experience of others. If all citizens were brought up in similar neighborhoods, going to similar schools, with similar exposures to others, given the same opportunities, we would achieve a society where racial differences no longer mattered since race and identity would no longer be linked. Whereas bussing was an attempt to repair educational inequalities, affirmative action was an attempt to integrate the work force so that professions were not racially determined and that racial disparities would be erased resulting in an integrated workforce with a common culture. Over time, with academic achievement equalized, cultural differences removed, and economic inequalities erased, we would move to a society where race no longer played a factor in determining personal identity, professional achievement, economic class, or cultural differences. It was thought that if people received a more or less identical eduation and were brought up in more or less identical surroundings, even things like ones views of history would be identical.

Why then has integration failed? Conservatives claim that integration has failed because ethnic and racial groups insist on self-segregating and refuse to integrate, liberals claim that persistent racism has kept integration from working. It is crucial to see that both sides accept the premises of integration, that the way to achieve it is to provide equal experiences. Since the theory on integration is correct, it is argued, if it has failed the only possible explanation is that it must have failed for moral reasons; someone is behaving immorally and thus preventing integration from succeeding. The validity of the theory of how integration was supposed to succeed is accepted by both sides, and if the theory is correct, then an explanation must be offered on why integration has failed to occur. The offered explanations are moral in character: either people are self-segregating, or people are racists. It is my contention that neither explanation is correct, and that integration failed because it was based on a faulty conception of personal identity.

Personal identity:
As I mentioned, the dominant theory of personal identity over the last several centuries was that of Descartes. For Descartes, one is individuated by being a separate spiritual substance. This substance acquires individual beliefs and desires through experience, and these can differ from individual to individual, and within the same individual over time, but the underlying substance remains constant and this is what constitutes the identity over time. Descartes’ views have largely been discarded as they give rise to all sorts of philosophical difficulties—primarily due to the mysterious nature of this spiritual substance and our vastly increased understanding of the workings of the brain. What substance theories of personal identity overlook is the crucial role of history in dertemining ones identity. What separates one from all other individuals, what “individuates” is ones history: the one thing that you can share with no other being is your history. The main import of this insight is that, as a result, to understand oneself, what makes you who you are and makes you different and unique from all other beings, is to understand your history. For example, if you want to know why you have the political beliefs you do, say why you believe in democracy, you need to know American history, why America is a democracy, what ideas lead to the political system we have today. But in order to understand this you need to understand the political disputes of the Enlightenment. And in order to understand this you need to know the political theories of the pre-Enlightenment that the Enlightenment was reacting to, etc. In order to understand why one has the religious beliefs you do one would clearly need to know ones personal history, how you were raised and any influences in your life that lead to your current beliefs. But to understand where these ideas came from would require one to know the various religious traditions, their history, the disputes that were involved in their creation, why they ended up the in form they have, and the history of how you ended up with these beliefs. To understand why you are where you are, you need to understand your personal history, why you moved from place to place through your life. But to understand this fully you need to know the history of your ancestors as they emigrated across the Earth even as far back as the original emigration out of Africa. Actually, you would need to know the history going even further back as to why the first humanids were in Africa in the first place, and the whole evolutionary history of life on earth. Race is the result of history as well, it records the migrations of people around the world from the original migrations out of Africa—in your race you wear the history of your ancestors on your sleeve as it were. The same could be said of any taste, desire, preference, aspiration, or conviction one has; to understand why you are the way you are you need to understand your history.

In summary, you are the way you are, and different from every other being (although sharing much with them) because your history is different from every other being. If this is the case, as I think it is, integration, i.e., the adoption of a new culture, is the process of dropping one history and adopting another as ones own. For example, historically, immigrants come to the US and they soon (in a generation or two) more or less forget their history and the culture that results from it and adopt their new one. Soon they're proud of how "we" defeated the British, the Nazis, and the Communists, even if they're in fact British, German, or Russian and it was their ancestors that "we" beat. Cultural practices are also the result of history--the traditions, mores, rituals, and celebrations of each culture are the result of historical events and adaptations. In integration the previous historically derived cultural practices are dropped in favor of the new and also historically evolved cultural practices. However, one can not drop their race the way you can drop other aspects of ones identity. For example, when the British celebrate “our” great naval history, Asian and middle-eastern immigrants know that that "our" does not include them—that British history does not include them. Discussions of how "we" defeated the French, or the Spanish, or the Germans do not have the same emotional weight when it is clear that "we" were not part of this history and that "we" come from someplace else. Caucasians living in non-white countries come to feel the same thing, that they can't drop their history/identity and become fully part of the culture. African-Americans can never and should never drop their history the way European immigrants have been able to and see the the United States as a land of opportunity and freedom when the fact that "they" had no freedom and opportunity is always staring them in the face.

This tension between being pressured on the one hand by the political push for integration to adopt the “mainstream” or “white” history and the resulting values, politics, and identity, and on the other hand by the obvious fact that “our” history results in a very different lessons, values, and political beliefs-- leads to the feeling of alienation that minorities universally express, and finds its way into different political beliefs, social mores, artistic expressions, etc. The cognitive dissonance between the pressure to adopt an alien history, and the impossibility of doing so when ones race and its attendant history is ever apparent, results in the widespread alienation and its attendant social ills. The facts of slavery and Jim Crow can not and should not ever be dropped for the adoption of an alien history, but since integration requires the adopting of another’s history, integration is impossible. No matter what efforts are made on behalf on integration, it could never result in people with distinct histories--African-Americans and European-Americans, or white Australians and aboriginal Australians, or the British and Middle-Eastern immigrants, or the Tamils and the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka--possessing the same histories. However, the failure of integration is not a moral failing on anybody’s part, it is the result of the adoption of a faulty theory of identity giving rise to false beliefs, and was bound to fail for this reason.

Given the fact that history is essential to ones identity, one of the worst things you can do to a person is force them to abandon ones true history/identity and adopt a false history and resulting values of another race, ethnic group, or religion whose history results in very different values, and cultural identity (as was attempted with native Americans). This is, “identitycide” and is one of the worst forms of racism imaginable. And yet identitycide is the basis of America’s educational system, and much of the alienation that plagues African-Americans and other racial groups. Almost inevitably, this very alienation itself becomes part of cultural identity and gets passed down through generations.

I would argue that the solution to this problem is to abandon liberalism and adopt some form of communitarianism.

Economic stimulus bill is a scam

This was spotted over at Calculated Risk:

It's been highly touted as an economic stimulus bill that will help millions of Americans - and has the backing of both President Bush and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. In the coming year, individuals would receive rebates of up to $600 and families up to $1,200. There are other goodies, too, including tax write-offs for small businesses and an expansion of the child tax credit.
But, as the old adage goes, nothing comes for free. As part of the bill, Congress is set to rush through an increase in the mortgage loan limits for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (and Federal Housing Administration insurance, too) - from $417,000 to $729,750 - the first step toward a massive financial disaster in which taxpayers will end up paying through the nose.
Here's how we got to this point. Domestic and international investors hold hundreds of billions of dollars in bad debt, because U.S. investment houses sold them junk securities based on often fraudulent mortgages. Many of these mortgages were sold to unqualified buyers under terms that made widespread foreclosures a certainty once the housing market began to fall.
Investment banks and bond rating agencies sat down and tried to figure out how to describe Americans with insufficient incomes and little for a down payment as great credit risks on loans too big for their incomes. The new rules focused on credit scores, because it was a good excuse to avoid looking at income and down payment, factors that would have restricted this moneymaking fiasco.
Now, thanks to Congress, junk bond investors will be able to pawn off their bad debt to Fannie and Freddie, instead of suing the big investment houses for ripping them off. This shift will certainly doom Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, so don't be surprised if we, the taxpayers, have to bail out poor Fannie and Freddie - to the tune of more than $1 trillion.
Why more than $1 trillion? If Goldman Sachs is correct in its recent projections that home prices in California are going to drop 35 to 40 percent, the state's losses alone would top $2 trillion, because California has a disproportionate number of jumbo loans. The irony here is that the collapse in housing prices could make Fannie insolvent even without raising the loan limit. Increasing Fannie's limit is like going on a spending spree with your credit cards because you know you are going to file for bankruptcy in a few months. Only here the taxpayer is left holding the bag. Our children will pay interest on this debt in perpetuity. It is our debt. It is inescapable.
In the coming months, Fannie and Freddie will buy up mortgages based on old, fraudulent appraisals and on loans with bogus inflated incomes. Unfortunately, many of these loans will still default.
But that's just the start. Brace yourself for another wave of faxes, phone calls and junk mail urging you to refinance at only 1 percent. With zero new regulation, the same bad actors that caused this crisis can once again inflate property appraisals and begin a new cycle of fraud.
There are firms that rent assets to people to help them fraudulently qualify for a mortgage - like loaning them money to keep in their bank account for a couple months so they can fool the lender with documented savings that evaporate the day after the mortgage is signed. Another popular ruse: The borrower pays an employer to pay him a lot of money in a fake job for a month or two so he can show a fat paycheck in his loan docs. Some real estate agents and mortgage brokers actually refer buyers to these services.
Contrary to popular myth, Fannie holds a lot of subprime debt, option ARM debt and other dodgy securities. Fannie and Freddie owned or guaranteed almost 45 percent of all mortgages in America last year. BusinessWeek noted in 2007 that Fannie and Freddie have "moved more prominently into low-documentation loans, which require little or no proof of the borrower's income." Expansion of Fannie and Freddie's reckless lending is exactly what Congress wants because it's plausibly deniable. Teary-eyed lawmakers can take to the airwaves a year from now and declare: "We had no idea Fannie could go under, but we can't cut and run now. We have to bail out Fannie and Freddie for the good of America! It's going to be a tough slog, but you're getting used to those, no?"
Those same lawmakers won't mention the fact that they get paid far more by real estate lobbyists than they do from our Treasury.
I've spoken with borrowers who stopped making mortgage payments seven or more months ago. None has received a default notice. Defaults may be much higher than banks are letting on. The data lags are growing suspiciously long. Nobody knows what's going on. Seven months without making a single payment! Will Fannie guarantee those loans because they aren't in formal default yet? Nobody wants to know, because if they know, they might be called to testify next year. That's why lawmakers want to raise the limits now and ask questions later.
This shortsighted plan poses a terrible risk to every American taxpayer, especially retirees, because Social Security money will be needed to bail out Fannie and Freddie. And even if you live in high-priced San Francisco, Los Angeles or New York - and stand to benefit from the increased loan limit - this is a horrible fraud on you, too, because raising the limit to $730,000 risks a systemic crisis that will cost far more than any temporary rebate check.
In support of the economic stimulus bill, Bush will have to face "working American families" and explain that some of their tax money is going to be spent guaranteeing $730,000 mortgages on $1 million homes. It's like some sort of upside-down communism where the poor pay the rich welfare. Why should taxes from families earning $48,000 a year be used to support expensive mortgages in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco? Welfare for the hungry and homeless is evil, but welfare for million-dollar homeowners facing a tough refi ... well, that's called "helping the economy."
I can imagine the president's radio address playing in the heartland: "We have some families with million-dollar homes on the coasts who are really hurting and so we need you, the working families of America, to stand together with them and help them avoid the kind of home price depreciation that might leave them without a new Lexus for years."
I guess Congress' hope is that median-income families will be too busy using their rebates to buy much-needed groceries to notice that the rich folk are getting way with a new scam.
Several months ago, economist Nouriel Roubini of New York University's Stern School of Business suggested that the housing market has been effectively nationalized. At first it seemed crazy, but now it's fairly obvious. In August alone, Fannie and Freddie increased their loan portfolios by $62 billion, and the Federal Home Loan Bank by $110 billion. That total of $172 billion would come to just over $2 trillion annually - not much less than the entire federal budget.
Everyone seeking a loan, securitizing a mortgage, and buying or selling a mortgage security will now be dealing, in one way or another, with the U.S. government. This type of intervention is very expensive and will eat everything in its path, including Social Security.
If we're going to have a government-financed intervention, it should be to make sure that Social Security benefits go to those who paid for them, that the poor are fed and housed, or that the army of uninsured receive health benefits. If, as they say, we don't have enough money for those important things, then I think we don't have enough money to bail out banks and bond investors.
Don't let me down, my fellow Americans. Let's vote out anyone who dares to vote for this scam.

More on localization

In a previous post I spoke about the localization movement among the Left. Localization is an attempt to resist globalization and support local community businesses, arts, and agriculture. There many reasons for this movement: environmentalists support how localization reduces energy costs and protects local farmland from development, anti-corporate activists support local independent small businesses from corporate chains, economic activists argue for keeping dollars on the local community rather that going to Wall Street or China. Although all of these movements are associated with the Left, the Democratic party is the party of strong centralized government, not decentralized local government. It is the Republicans who are mostly associated with Federalism, although through the neo-cons the Republican party has become the party of big government conservatism. Most of those who champion localization have not yet taken the step from local business to local government, but there is an opportunity for a new political coalition of the paleo-cons and neo-libs seeking decentralized government and to push power as far as possible to localities and to demand the ability to make decisions concerning the course of their communities. If the Republicans can break the grip of the neo-cons, and re-brand their philosophy “localization” rather than Federalism, they have the best chance of attracting those interested in localization.

What culture are you?

Multiculturalism purports to be a system whereby different cultures can coexist side-by-side. It seems to me that the first question someone would ask themselves when thinking about it is "if we're going to be a multicultural society, what culture am I?" It is my perception that, ironically, were you to ask many multiculturalists “so what culture are you then? What do you bring to the table?” they would be uncomfortable and not know how to answer. That is because, as I’ve argued previously, most multiculturalists bring nothing to the table, they are consumers of cultures, not members of any cultural tradition. No matter what their background is, they are uncomfortable with self-identifying themselves as such, and do not consider any cultural heritage to be a part of their identity. They can’t say that they are Americans any longer, because under multiculturalism there is no longer any such thing as American culture, only subcultures.

On Community

Old style conservatives, paleo-cons, were against bigness per se, big government and big business. However, in the face of communism, they were vehemently pro private property rights and this has allowed big business the opening to destroy their traditional antagonists on the right and replace them with the neo-cons’ subservience to international corporations. The traditional conservative’s ideal was the independent businessman, the shop owner of the traditional American Main Street. These people were the bastions of the middle class, and the pillars of the community not only in an economic sense, but those who provided much of what consider the virtues of community, shared values, interdependence and support, trust. Americans embrace of big business has wiped out these people and replaced the traditional Main Street with the big box stores that blight the American landscape today.
The traditional left found it greatest support among labor groups which required the existence of big business for their own existence. They might have been against management, but they were comfortable with big business as long as it played by certain rules. There is now a movement among the new left, the neo-libs, to emphasize community and localism, to shop local and support local businesses. The arguments given for this support are very similar to what you would hear a Republican circa 1955 espouse, i.e., the already mentioned facts that these people were the bastions of the middle class, and the pillars of the community not only in an economic sense, but those who provided much of what consider the virtues of community, shared values, interdependence and support, and trust. A vehement anti-corporatism is added by the new Left based on the offenses and crimes of corporations in the form of third world labor practices, environmental abuses, the fall in American standard of living, and the fact that profits of corporations go to the top rather than being reinvested in the community. The Democratic party still ignores these voices as it has become as enslaved by corporations as the Republicans have, but the voices are loud and growing. It is one of the interesting juxtapositions that has occurred over the decades where the Right and Left have switched positions.
Into the mix must be thrown Harvard researcher Robert Putnam’s recent findings that diversity is the enemy of community. But as the Left considers itself the champions of diversity, sometime in the future there will arise a conflict between their current infatuation with community and their allegiance to diversity. Just like the religious Right and corporate Right is the Republican coalition today, a coalition that has lasted decades and is currently coming apart, the alliance between racial groups and anti-corporate forces is basically the Liberal coalition today. But Putnam’s work shows that they are basically at odds and will come apart at some time in the future, perhaps decades from now.
It would be fascinating to see a new coalition between the anti-corporate Right and anti-corporate Left.

The logic and language of multiculturalism

Open any newspaper and you are likely to se a story where the claim is made that issue X is “important to the y-American community.” Affirmative action is important to the African-American community, abortion is an important issue to the evangelical community, immigration is an important issue to the Latino-community, AIDS funding is an important issue to the gay community. Every police department in any major city has a liaison to the various communities that make up their city. This rise of communities as the unit of political discourse is an acknowledgement of the victory of multiculturalism and the death of integration in modern western societies. Again and again, the fact that an issue is important to a community is given as all the justification that is needed for the position on the issue. This should not be a shock, if multiculturalism holds that all cultures are equal, that all cultures are the result of contingent historical forces, and that values are the result of ones culture, there can be no debate over the value in question, only the assertion that it is important to your culture and therefore worthy of respect. To refuse to accept the rightness of such an assertion is to be “culturally insensitive” and ultimately racist.
The trouble obviously arises where two cultures with opposite values both assert its importance to their respective communities. Since all cultures are equally entitled to their values, and all values equally contingent on that culture, there can be no rational debate over the value in question. There seems to be only two choices: one culture (in a democracy it is usually the minority culture) has to surrender their value, or both cultures continue to practice their values but in different jurisdictions. As I have pointed out previously, the first is the value of integration, the second is the position of communitarianism. I have criticized multiculturalism as being the position that it is the majority that must relent and accept the position of the minority.
This logic and language of multiculturalism lies in sharp contrast to the traditional Enlightenment view that a position on an issue should be the result of rational insight and that ones position is therefore open to rational criticism. But if a position on an issue is the result of values arising from contingent historical forces, there can be no inter-cultural debate, only the assertion of cultural importance and demand for recognition.
However, the acceptance of this argument does not lead to multiculturalism as it is usually understood. There is a tension between thinking that cultures are the result of historical forces, and the belief that the foundational principles of western societies, democracy, equality, freedom, are universal transhistorical values. The problem is that multiculturalists have appealed to these principles in order to argue for multiculturalism rather than seeing these principles as simply another set of contingent cultural practices. You can’t appeal to transhistorical values to argue for the position that all values are contingent, which is what the common conception of multiculturalism ultimately asserts. And so, within a western society where democracy, individual rights, and equality before the law reign, you can not simply appeal that an issue is important to the so-and-so community as justification of a position. But the view of cultures or communities as foundational particles of politics is essential to the multicultural argument and so multiculturalism, as it is generally understood, is impossible in western societies (although western countries could come to abandon their belief in the universality of individual rights). Multiculturalism has it backwards, instead of an umbrella of transhistorical values supporting a multicultural acceptance of contingent cultures, contingent historical forces have lead to a civilization that believes that values are transhistorical.
You can’t have a non-western subculture given equal weight within a larger western culture (or for that matter a western subculture within a larger non-western culture). At best you will achieve what we usually do see, a parallel culture, an autonomous region within a western nation, suspicious of the law, where everything is kept behind closed doors.

The left and multiculturalism

I try to search the blogosphere regularly to see what others are saying about multiculturalism and other issues I discuss here. What stands out it that if you do a search for “multiculturalism,” you are presented with an almost entirely right wing list of blogs. The right wing blogs generally consist of attacks on the multicultural policies of whatever country from which the blog originates, and examples of various perceived slights and attacks in the name of cultural diversity on the traditional culture of that country. I almost never come across a defense of multiculturalism on a liberal blog. You do see the occasional liberal blog praising the multicultural diversity of their city, but these are invariably fluff pieces that avoid the difficult questions involving sexism, homophobia, and various abhorrent cultural practices. I wonder then why the left is so uncomfortable discussing and defending multiculturalism. I think the answer is that the left is pulled in two directions. First, there is the legacy of the civil rights movement in liberal politics. Most liberals see themselves as heirs of the civil rights movement and the stated goal of the civil rights movement was integration, not multiculturalism. And so I sense a nervousness over whether taking a pro-multicultural position is in fact, as it surely is, an abandonment of the hard won gains of integration. But on the other hand, the left are the traditional champions of minority groups, and minority groups have embraced multiculturalism instead of integration. And so multiculturalism forces an awkward choice between integration and minority rights that liberals would rather not have to make. If a liberal blog decided to defend multiculturalism they would soon need to make a choice between multiculturalism and their traditional attacks on sexism or homophobia. They would then ultimately be left with the position that “diversity is fine as long as everyone behaves like western, urban, upper middle class, liberals.” This split is clear in feminism as some feminists have been roundly criticized for failing to condemn the sexism of many cultures in favor of "cultural sensitivity," while others have decided to attack these practices wherever they occur.
The choice can not be put off forever by the left, and right now it is unclear to me on which side the choice will fall. The right, ironically, has now become the champions of integration.

Multiculturalism victorious

Despite being critical of what generally is understood by multiculturalism—the two-tiered, parasitic multiculturalism I have previously discused—I do think that multiculturalism has won and defeated integration and will only continue to become the dominant social policy. In the United States we are in an unusual situation, so-called “mainstream,” aka white, Americans began to accept integration in the 1960s. But civil rights groups have moved away from integration and embraced multiculturalism. This has left a divide: the far left, the traditional champions of integration, have moved on to multiculturalism, and the right, the traditional enemies of integration, have become its champions. And so the majority of “white” Americans still think that the goal is to have all racial and cultural groups integrated into “mainstream” American cultural practices and values, while those who are supposed to be integrating have understandably declined the generous offer to abandon their identities and decided that they wish to retain their independent and distinct cultures and embraced multiculturalism. As I mentioned at the outset, I believe that integration has lost out to multiculturalism, but “white” America has failed to realize this. This has lead to many angry accusations from the right that cultural/racial groups refuse to integrate and self-segregate.

The question arises: what will happen when Americans realize that integration is no longer the goal? There seem to be two possibilities. The first possibility is that there will be a backlash and a renewed effort to emphasize integration. As I argued in my previous post, I think integration is doomed due to irrevocable historical factors, but the majority of people still believe that it is possible, desirable, and morally imperative. This will lead to increasingly bitter critical accusations being hurled against cultural groups that they “refuse to assimilate.” We see this now in the immigration debates raging across the western world. The result of this path is greater mistrust, greater segregation, an emphasis on cultural differences, and more alienation.

A second possibility is that people embrace what I have called “multicultural atomism.” In this path there will not be pressure to force integration on distinct racial and cultural groups, and a large degree of political autonomy will be permitted among different cultural groups. Multicultural atomism is different from what I have called “multicultural parasitism” in that there would be no group of supra-cultural parasitic elite and there would be a movement among all people to rediscover their history and cultural heritage. This approach has the virtue of fostering cultural diversity without the elitism of multiculturalism as it is currently practiced. It also removes the alienating pressure that integration foists on minority groups. However, in many ways this is also the most difficult path to follow. Political questions regarding what degree of autonomy to grant to different cultural groups, the place of individual rights, and other problems with communitarian politics all arise with this path.

On cultural diversity

Just for the record, lest I be misunderstood, I absolutely love cultural diversity and think that one of the most atrocious things in the world is the destruction of indigenous cultures, languages, and peoples by globalization and cultural imperialism. When I see footage from Africa or southeast Asia, heirs to ancient and unique cultures and civilizations, and everyone looks like they just walked out of the Gap, I find it nauseating. The idea of everyone on Earth dressing the same, listening to the same music, watching the same movies, and having the same ideas once globalization has conquered all is a nightmare. But I love cultural diversity the way I admire my child's classmates: I might admire them, applaud their abilities and talents, and my child might not be the nicest, or smartest, or most talented, and I certainly don't want the other kids to immitate mine, but I still love my child the most. I just wish my kid were more virtuous.
My hope is to preserve the world's many cultural traditions from the onslaught of globalization without falling prey to the elitism of multiculturalism. I think it's an empirical fact that the vast majority of people in the world see their identity in their family, their faith, and their heritage. It is in these people that we find the true cultural diversity around the world and where there remains hope that it can still be preserved, against globalization, if that's even possible at this point. The alternative is to embrace the nauseating homogeny of globalization.

Historical identification

In my post of August 4th I laid out a theory of personal identity wherein it is ones history that constitutes ones identity. It is the fact that history is ones identity that explains the curious psychological phenomena of historical identification. American’s are rightly proud of the way we beat the British in the Revolutionary War, the Germans in the World Wars, the Russians in the Cold War, etc. I recently heard a congressman say that “we fought that Revolutionary War so that we didn’t have to be told by Europeans what to do.” Malcolm X once said that “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock landed on us.” What is odd about these statements is that, strictly speaking, we did none of these things. The congressman didn’t fight the Revolutionary War, no living American did, and yet it is often said that we beat the British, or that we beat the Germans, or that we put a man on the moon. No living African-American was a slave, and yet you can year claims that we were slaves before the Civil War. These cases of historical identity extend into the realm of emotions as well: often one can hear that people are proud of the way that “we” beat the Germans, or ashamed that “we” were slaves, when, strictly speaking, one would think that you should only feel proud or ashamed of the acts that you yourself did. The reason for this is that, as I have argued in the previous post, ones identity is ones history, and that in this sense, we did beat the Germans and ought to be proud that we did so. European-Americans often say that African-Americans should “get over” slavery, or that the developing world should “get over” imperialism and the negative emotions it continues to produce since they were not personally slaves, but one could then reply that European-Americans should get over feeling pride over their ancestors accomplishments since current individuals did not accomplish these things.

The Personas

In my August 4th entry “On Personal Identity” I argued that ones identity is constituted by ones history, that all of the values, beliefs, abilities, propensities, and desires are the result of ones individual and group history. To understand anything about oneself is to understand your history. However, there is a distinct subset of people who, although their identity is their history as well, they don’t identify with their own or any other history. I call this group of people the “Personas.” Personas have turned their back on their heritage and embraced a new identity that is primarily constituted by their profession, but also by their “lifestyle.” It is only certain professions that either attract or produce Personas, primarily arts, academia, athletics, big business, and other advocates of meritocracy. For most people, on the other hand, their profession is only tangentially related to their identity, because most fields are not part of the meritocracy: a fork-lift driver is not going to think that that is who they are; it is their family, their faith, their historical heritage that forms their conception of who they are. Personas are generally what the right-wing used to call the “cultural elite.” It is no coincidence that Personas are what I have termed “multicultural parasites,” their identity not constituted by their heritage, they feel no allegiance to any particular cultural tradition and are thus free to consume the cultural production of others.
In his recent controversial work, Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam showed that as diversity increases, so does social alienation and withdrawal. The exception, he found, was the creative fields, the realm of the Personas. We can now see why diversity works in such fields and not elsewhere: because the Personas who dominate these fields perceive their profession as their identity (and look down on those in non-creative fields). There is a respect they feel for others who, like themselves, have succeeded in the competitive creative meritocracy. But Putnam’s belief that the success of cultural diversity in these fields gives hope to reversing the alienation that accompanies diversity is a fool’s hope. The vast majority of people are not Personas, their sense of self is constituted by their historical heritage, and those with another heritage and another historico-cultural identity will never feel the same way about other’s heritage as they do their own. They can respect others’ heritage, admire, and understand it, but you can never feel the way about another’s heritage the way you do about your own just like you can respect and admire another’s child, but never feel about them the way you do about your own.

What does multiculturalism love?

I’ve pointed out before that the one thing that multiculturalists do not love is cultural diversity. They certainly are appalled by female circumcision practiced in some cultures, the treatment of women in by far the majority of countries, the status of gays in just about every culture, and the cultural practices of just about every historical culture. Within America, those lovers of diversity never cease to rail against the rural redneck hicks or homogenized suburbs. In short, multiculturalists love diversity as long as everyone acts like white, urban, western, liberals. Since, contrary to appearances, it is not cultural diversity that multiculturalists love, what then are they professing to love? After removing all these horrible cultural practices that multiculturalists find so offensive, what is left to "celebrate"? All we are left with are a remnant of cultural features that are acceptable to multiculturalists: food, music, and dancing are acceptable as far as cultural diversity goes. In short, multiculturalists love to be fed and entertained, to have their beloved monocultures feed and entertain them—multiculturalism is cultural parasitism par excellance.

Multicultural parasites

In a previous post I criticized multiculturalism by pointing out contradictions that arose when one considered what actually multiculturalism was proposing. The argument began by pointing out that the multiple cultures that multiculturalism purports to celebrate are not themselves multicultural. Thus, if multiculturalism advocates that we adopt its multicultural stance, it ends up destroying the cultures it purports to respect. That is, if everyone acts multicultural and abandons their cultural heritage, all the non-multicultural cultures—by far the vast majority of cultures on the planet—perish. Multiculturalism, thus requires that everyone else remain monocultural while we good multiculturalists float above all cultures, enjoying all the various cultural production of the Earth. And so multiculturalism requires a two-tiered system: a foundation of monocultures, and an upper-crust of those multiculturalists who do the celebrating of diversity, who consume the cultural products—music, food, art, celebrations, fashion, etc—but produce none themselves. These cultural parasites, mostly upper class, white, urban, liberals, while themselves identifying with no culture, have no problem consuming the fruits of the world’s cultures. Therefore, despite multiculturalism’s egalitarian rhetoric, it is in fact an elitist ideology, requiring two separate systems in order to exist.
However, it is possible to allow for cultural diversity without requring a two-tiered elitist system. We can now see that it is possible to eliminate the two-tiered system for what we might call multicultural atomism. In it, the elitist parasitic class, instead of feeding off others cultures, would themselves rediscover their cultural identity. However, the motto of multicultural atomism would not be “celebrate diversity,” it would be “allow diversity, celebrate your heritage.”

On personal identity

One of the enduring philosophical questions is the question of what makes an individual the individual they are. What makes me the same person I was yesterday, or last year? What differentiates me from all the other people? If my memories could be transplanted into another person, would I be that person or the previous? The dominant theory of personal identity over the last several centuries was that of Descartes. For Descartes, one is individuated by being a separate spiritual substance. This substance acquires individual beliefs and desires through experience, and these can differ from individual to individual, and within the same individual over time, but the underlying substance remains constant and this is what constitutes the identity over time. Descartes’ views have largely been discarded as they give rise to all sorts of philosophical difficulties—primarily due to the mysterious nature of this spiritual substance and our vastly increased understanding of the workings of the brain. Others have taught that it is ones memories that constitute ones identity, but this likewise gives rise to all sorts of insoluble riddles over memory transplants, lost memories, changed memories, etc.
The truth is that what separates one from all other individuals, what “individuates” is ones history: the one thing that you can share with no other being is your history, no two beings have the same history. Even identical twins have different histories, even from the moment their cells separated. And even if ones memories were implanted into another person, your histories would therefore differ.
The main import of this discussion is that, as a result, to understand oneself, what makes you who you are and makes you different and unique from all other beings, is to understand your history. For example, if you want to know why you have the political beliefs you do, say why you believe in democracy, you need to know American history, why America is a democracy, what ideas lead to the political system we have today. But in order to understand this you need to understand the political disputes of the Enlightenment. An in order to understand this you need to know the political theories of the pre-enlightenment that the Enlightenment was reacting to, etc. In order to understand why one has the religious beliefs you do one would clearly need to know ones personal history, how you were raised and any influences in your life that lead to your current beliefs. But to understand where these ideas came from would require one to know the various religious traditions, their history, the disputes that were involved in their creation, why they ended up the in form they have, and the history of how you ended up with these beliefs. To understand why you are where you are, you need to understand your personal history, why you moved from place to place through your life. But to understand this fully you need to know the history of your ancestors as they emigrated across the earth even as far back as the original emigration out of Africa. Actually, you would need to know the history going even further back as to why the first humanids were in Africa in the first place, and the whole evolutionary history of life on earth. The same could be said of any taste, desire, preference, aspiration, or conviction one has; to understand why you are the way you are you need to understand your history. Even to understand why one likes something as inconsequential as the taste of strawberry ice cream would require an understanding of history, in part your personal history and your various reasons for liking it, but also in part evolutionary history and why we developed the preference for sweets that we have, as well as the biological processes in play in the perception of sweetness.
In summary, you are the way you are, and different from every other being (although sharing much with them) because your history is different from every other being.

Republicans should "peel off" environmentalists.

I have argued previously that Republicans should try to become the "sustainability party." But the argument was based on how the Republicans could regain their footing and unite their competing principles. Today I want to argue that Republicans should embrace environmentalists for political reasons. The Democratic party is primarily made up of minority groups, consumer advocacy groups, lawyers, and environmentalists. If Republicans want to widen their base, which of these groups would be easiest to attract? Bush and Rove obviously decided early on that of these groups it was Hispanics that they were going to try to "peel off." This has failed. It seems to me that it is environmentalists which would be most likely to move to the Republican side, although it would not be easy given how much they have burned their bridges with environmentalists over the last 25 years. But there is still the legacy of U.S. Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, and Richard Nixon (who, although perhaps begrudgingly, created the EPA, passed the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, and the Clean Water Act) to build on. It will not be easy especially as Bush and Cheney have been dong all they can to quietly dismantle environmental protections and weaken enforcement efforts. Environmentalists are not likely to trust Republicans for some time. But the effort should be made to begin to build trust. It can not be done half-heartedly, or with a "me too" spirit that would give environmentalists no real reason to prefer Republicans. Democrats have not been concentrating on environmental issues so now is the perfect time to seize the initiative. There are 4 traditional Republican traits that can provide the foundation of a Republican environmental platform:
1. Republicans are traditionally the party of law and order. Thus enforcement of existng environmental laws should be emphasized.
2. The Christian "creation care" movement seeks to protect God's creation, especially endangered species. There is no reading of the story of Noah's ark that can support the view that God wants his creatures to go extinct.
3. Republicans have a traditional alliance with the "rod and gun" crowd. Trout Unlimted and Ducks Unlimited have been trying to protect duck breeding ground and fish spawning ground. These efforts should be supported.
4. The suburbs have traditionaly been Republican strongholds. Thus the concern of suburbanites over suburban sprawl should be addressed.
So here are some ways Republicans could begin to attract envieonmentalists:
1. Hold press conferences in national parks that have been overrun and destroyed by illegal immigrants.
2. Play up their traditional alliance with the "rod and gun" Republicans--more photo ops out in the national forests.
3. A massive effort to support the Endangered Species Act. The Christian "creation care" movement is a good place to start, but must not seen too Christian-centric if you wish to attract environmentalists.
4. Come out strongly against suburban sprawl in order to attract concerned suburbanites.
5. Play upthe traditional "law and order" reputation of Republicans by spotlighting enforcement of the clean air and water acts. Appoint an attorney general who is to environmental protection what Robert Kennedy was to organized crime.

What is integration?

Integration is the process of dropping one history and adopting another as ones own . Historically, immigrants come to the US and they soon (in a generation or two) forget their history and adopt their new one. Soon they're proud of how "we" beat the British, the nazis, and the commies, even if they're in fact British, German, or Russian and it was their ancestors that "we" beat. Cultural practices are also the result of history--the traditions, mores, rituals, and celebrations of each culture are the result of historical events and adaptations. In integration the previous historically derived cultural practices are dropped in favor of the also historically evolved cultural practices of the US.

On amnesty

It is generally a priciple of law that the punishment for violating the law does not let you achieve or acquire what you broke the law to achieve or acquire. For example, if you build an unsafe building you do not pay a fine and then let the building remain in that condition, if you steal something you do not get to pay a fine and then keep what you stole, and if you deny someone their rights you do not pay a fine but then be allowed to leave the person in that state. How then, could the punishment for entering the country illegally be to pay a fine and be allowed to achieve what you broke the law to achieve?

On Diversity

What many mean by "diversity" is actually homogeneity. They applaud integration and their conception of multiculturalism, when these forces serve to destroy diversity. A world where everyone dresses alike, thinks alike, listens to the same music, sees the same movies, reads the same books, watches the same TV shows, i.e., one where globalization has triumphed, and assimilation and integration are complete, is one where nauseating homogeneity reigns, and diversity has been annihilated.

How to reform the GOP

Over the past decade, conservatism has mutated into a form that is barely recognizable from its historical roots. Traditional conservatism has imploded, it has evolved into a nightmare version of itself that is barely recognizable: the conservative loyalty to independent capitalism epitomized by small business owners morphed into uncritical subservience to soulless international corporatism, the conservative emphasis on faith and religion morphed into "faith based" government programs, the traditional rod and gun conservationists were jettisoned to big oil, coal, and gas interests, the traditional belief in low taxes morphed into record deficits and debt. Debt, waste, pollution, deficits, and big government have become the legacy of a conservatism that treats its principles piecemeal and drifts away without any foundation. I would like to suggest that the the GOP can tie all of its chaotic competing principles back together, and re-emerge with a message for the 21st century, by focusing on the common concept of sustainability--the GOP should become the party of sustainability and all political issues framed and evaluated on this basis. It is sustainability, I believe, that is the bedrock conservative principle that ties the others together. Massive trade and budget deficits are unsustainable, unchecked population growth from immigration is unsustainable, unbalanced budgets are unsustainable, reliance on fossil fuels is unsustainable, community destroying sprawl is unsustainable. In becoming the "sustainability" party the GOP can put the "conserve" back in "conservative", give the party a much needed environmental platform, attract middle class voters who are worried about unchecked development destroying their communities, and bring back the rod and gun and other old-time Republicans who remember when the GOP was the party of environmental conservation. In focusing on sustainability, the GOP can speak about immigration in a way that answers the inevitable charges of racism. In focusing on sustainability, the party can create a popular energy policy that does not look like Republicans are the party of coal, oil, and gas. And by emphasizing sustainability Republicans can get back their reputation as the party of fiscal responsibility. I believe, sustainability will be the issue of the 21st century and the party that captures the issue and can speak of it with the most conviction will be the one that dominates. I hope that the powers-that-be in the GOP heed my advice.

Why do liberals hate America?

Nothing infuriates liberals more than when conservatives claim they hate America. For this reason conservatives should repeat it as often as possible. Did you ever have a friend who you knew had something that pissed them off? And for just this reason you would bring this thing up just to get a rise out of him? Claiming that liberals hate America is the same thing. Now, I don’t believe that liberals actually hate America, or at least their image of it, but saying that they do irritates them so much that it should be repeated as often as possible. But enough fun. What liberals really hate is American history. If conservatives really want to discredit liberals, they should bring up American history as much as possible. To this end, if conservatives want to appeal to independents there should be a concerted effort to remind Americans of their heritage at every turn since conservatives see themselves as the heirs of American history while liberals despise it.
Conservatives like to believe that they are the representatives of America's principles, while liberals violate those principles, but in truth when liberals claim that they love America, what they really mean is that they love America’s principles (especially as represented in the Declaration of Independence whereas conservatives emphasize the Constitution). It must be admitted that American has often failed to live up to its principles, and this is the reason for liberals' hatred. However, your typical American has still not had their pride in America's many great accomplishments extinguished, it provides an opening for conservatives to attract independents. Concentrating on America’s history will expose the hatred liberals have for America’s history, and by implication America itself, and drive independents to the conservative side. Thus, conservatives should try to organize local and national observances of VE day, VJ day, Pearl Harbor day, anniversaries of Gettysburg, Shiloh, Antietam, D-Day, Lexington and Concord, Yorktown, Valley Forge, Washington’s birthday, Lincoln’s birthday, Jefferson’s birthday, Grant’s birthday, Ike’s birthday, even FDR’s birthday etc. Conservative politicians and groups showing up at these historical commemorations and making non-partisan patriotic speeches will have the effect of seeming to expose the love conservatives have for America, and reveal the hatred liberals have for American history.

Is multiculturalism a culture?

What is the relationship between multiculturalists and the multiple cultures they love? Clearly a multiculturalist likes all of the multiple cultures they celebrate whether they be Muslim, Japanese, Chinese, Somali, African-American, etc. Oddly enough, however, none of these cultures are themselves multi-cultural. Japan for example is fiercely protective of its culture, as are most other cultures in the world. So do multiculturalists advocate we all adopt multiculturalism as our ethic? If so, multiculturalism advocates changing the cultures they purport to respect. If multiculturalism wants al these cultures to change and to adopt a common culture, in what sense is it multi-cultural and not monocultural? If multiculturalists are not urging that all people adopt multiculturalism and that instead people retain their culture, what exactly is multiculturalism advocating? That people remain mono-cultural and not multicultural? If everyone behaves multicultural, and enjoys all types of foods, all ethnic festivals, adopts all religious beliefs, enjoys all types of music and visual arts--in other words, if they abandon their culture--multiculturalism ends up destroying all the cultures it purports to protect.
My suspicion is that liberal multiculturalists really want everyone else to remain monocultural while they aristocratically float above them all and want to reserve the multicultural perspective and arrogant, elitist moral and aesthetic superiority and sense of freedom they feel for themselves.

Environmentalists and Immigration

How come environmentalists abandon their "think globally, act locally" slogan when it comes to overpopulation? I'd think the true environmental response to immigration would be to call for the complete end to immigration to the country, except to keep population levels steady. However, strangely many if not most environmentalists appear to be pro-immigration. The reasons you mostly see given is that stopping immigration would be impractical or uneconomic. It's funny that environmentalists of various stripes can advocate replacing all fossil fuels with renewable energy, replacing all commercial agriculture with organic methods, advocate everyone on Earth becomming vegan, advocate running the entire world auto fleet on ethanol or bio-diesel, advocate strict laws limiting greenhouse emmisions, advocate vast swaths of land be put off-limits to economic development--all of which I favor by the way--but when someone advocates ending population growth in the country, all of a sudden environmentalists are concerned with what is "impractical" or "uneconomic."
Environmentalists are constantly being hit by criticism from right-wingers that their proposals are uneconomic, impractical, or that me simply recycling, or buying organic, or eating less meat, or driving less, won't have an effect when others continue to do so. It is shocking to see those same criticisms that the right-wing like to haul out against environmentalists, being hauled out BY environmentalists on this one issue. For example, sometimes you will see someone reply by saying that it does not matter in the overall picture of world population growth if the US controls population since population growth continues in other countries. This "why bother when others will continue to increase population" is the exact attitude environmentalists have been fighting against for decades when it comes to recycling, energy conservation, pollution, and a host of other environmental problems. Environmentalists do not have a problem calling for the end of logging in a North American forest even if it will not have an effect on overall deforestation since logging continues in, say, Indonesia. "Think globally, act locally" is our answer to such arguments, and I think it is horrible to see it abandoned on this issue, it makes us look like hypocrites. I am all for women's education, birth control, economic development, etc., in all countries. But on this issue, few are apparently thinking globally and advocating acting locally.
If a fishery was being overfished environmentalists would mandate that the overfishing stop; if a strand of redwoods were threatened with logging, they would stop the logging; if a factory was spewing pollution across the landscape, they would demand the factory stop polluting. Then we can begin to build communities where we get by without doing these things, but that should be only after we stop the harmful practice. The greatest successes of the environmental movement--the clean water act, the clean air act, the endangered species act--all succeed by having strict rules in place which mandate that the environmentally destructive practice end. We should take the same approach when it comes to overpopulation--demand the the practice stop, then begin to build communities where we get by without the destructive process.
I even see environmentalists using the corporatists claim that the US needs large numbers of immigrants in order to "do the work that Americans wont." But I thought environmentalists were in favor of solving environmental problems, and economics came second. Animal rights activists don't care about the economic effects of ceasing meat consumption, forest defenders don't care if some loggers must lose their jobs, fish advocates don't care about the effects on fishermen, but now all of a sudden we're concerned with "labor shortages"? It is true that in many cases we are helping fishermen in the long run by limiting catch, or loggers by protecting forests, but we've always been willing to accept short-term hardships in favor of long term sustainability. Limiting immigration is no different than the above cases--short term hardships must give way to long-term sustainability, and just as in the long-term we are doing everyone a favor by stopping logging or overfishing, in the long-term we are doing everyone a favor by taking a stand on overpopulation.
Actually, I'm not against logging if it is done in accordance to FSC standards, or fishing if it is done in accordance with MSC standards. Why is that? Because FSC practices are sustainable, MSC practices are sustainable, organic food production is sustainable, but population growth is not. There are no set of standards, short of colonizing other planets (but I wouldn't hold my breath on that) that can be applied to population growth that can make it sustainable in the long run. When it comes to population, the only sustainable practice is no growth.
In America we have a great opportunity in that all population growth is the result of immigration, if we stopped immigration, we would have steady population, and then we could truly begin to learn to live sustainably and without the insane demand for constant growth. Population growth can not continue unabated, all other environmental issues are a subset of population problems.

What is Multiculturalism?

Suppose two cultures were having a dispute. The star-bellied Sneetches like to play their humphaphones every day at 6 PM, and the non-star-bellied Sneetches like to eat their dinners in silence at that time. The majority non-star-bellied Sneeches want to pass a noise ordinance in the neighborhood. Integration would say that the minority culture should integrate with the majority culture and give up their practice. Separatism would say that both groups can keep their practices, but do them in separate places. But what would multiculturalism say? I used to think that multiculturalism provided no answer to the question, that it was an empty doctrine. Then it hit me: multiculturalism would say that it is the majority that must give up their cultural practice and adopt the culture of the minority group, that unless the majority accomodates the cultural practice of the minority, some moral evil has occurred. Thus we see all these ridiculous efforts in the western world to appease other cultures by abandoning their own cultural practice and accepting practices and demands that they would normally not.

On multiculturalism

What most liberal multiculturalists mean by "multiculturalism" is really monoculturalism. For example, Japan is an extremely sexist society. I doubt any self-described multiculturalists would want sexist cultures included in their list of acceptible cultures. The same goes for female genital mutilation practiced in Africa, or forcing women to wear the burka or headscarf in the middle east. And forget about historical cultures. Most of the cultural practices of the Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, middle ages Europe, ante-bellum southern US, and just about any other historical society would be found abhorrent. Plus, most multiculturalists I know never cease to rail at the "souless homogenized suburbs" or rural redneck hicks. Just face it, to liberals, so-called multiculturalism is really a early 21st century, western, urban, upper-middle class monoculturalism. It mostly amounts to urban hipsters and yuppies desiring many choices of resataurants.
To immigrants to western countries, "multiculturalism" means something else.

Liberals and conservatives...

Liberals think that since they're miserable, everyone should be as miserable as them. Conservatives think that since they're not miserable, no one else has a right to be.