The Good News about Bad News

     Marshall McLuhan famously remarked that while we don't know who discovered water, it probably wasn't the fish. I want to say something about the good news that we don't notice in the background of horrible events such as the shooting in Aurora last week, because we are so deeply immersed in the good news that we don't even recognize it as significant.
     The good news is that these shootings are news at all. We are shocked and horrified and saddened by these events, and rightly so, for they are shocking and horrifying and sad, but we are also shocked because they are, for the most part, unusual. True, they happen much more often than we'd like; every few months some pathetic loser thinks he can bring meaning to his life through some spectacular orgy of violence. But that's not really so often, when you think about it on a global scale. It's rare enough that it makes the news if it happens anywhere in the developed world.

     Think what things were like a thousand years ago. Whole villages were massacred in Viking raids, but the news spread slowly, and even if there had been a global satellite network to share information instantly around the world, it wouldn't have been broadcast anyway, because no one cared. It wasn't news, anymore than a fatal car accident in Toronto attracts the attention of strangers in Buenos Aires; they have their own fatal car accidents to be worried about. "A village 20 miles away was slaughtered in a raid? Oh, yeah, that happened to my cousin six years ago." And compared to the level of violence that was commonplace in those days, for 12 people to die in one incident would have been quite unremarkable, except perhaps to those who actually knew any of the victims.

     Even a hundred years ago, violence was far more common than it is today. Less than that, even; I happened to catch a snippet of an old Flintstones episode where Fred was trying to bully Barney into going along with some scheme or other, menacing him with a fist. I was actually a little shocked; our cultural sensitivities towards casual violence have changed so much.
     We no longer accept violence as an appropriate way to resolve our differences. Well, that's not completely true; we still glorify it in TV and movies, and people talk about how they'd love to punch or shoot some person or other, but for the most part, we reject it as a dispute resolution mechanism. If you have a problem with someone today, you are expected to talk it out, resolve it peacefully, and if that fails, sue. In the past, however, violence was viewed as a perfectly natural and even appropriate way of getting what you wanted. Not getting enough from farming, fishing and hunting? Well, raid a neighbouring village or tribe.

     To be sure, there are still lots of people who resort to violence. But the spectacular shootings that make the news every so often have a different kind of motive. These are not people robbing banks or trains, trying to take economic resources by force. These are typically dissatisfied and unfulfilled losers looking for fame and notoriety. They want to be able to think of themselves as important and powerful, and I suppose they want our help and that of the press to reinforce that. But the point here is that shocking acts of violence get them that attention, and why? Because violence is no longer commonplace; it is rare enough today that it actually does shock us.
     That is the good news. This kind of violence happens in part because other kinds of violence don't happen so much anymore. In a way, it's a symptom of success. Human society may always have some level of violence, and if we're getting to the point where some of that violence is due to the very fact that we find violence unusual, I think that in the big picture, that's something to be thankful for.

     But it can be better. I think that if we were to recognize violence not as something evil, scary and mysterious, but perfectly mundane and distasteful, we could remove some of the reason for this kind of shooting. Decent people will handle feces if they must (changing diapers, cleaning up after a pet, maintenance of plumbing, etc.) but there's nothing mysterious or heroic about it, and we all try to avoid it as much as possible. Someone who runs into a movie theatre and flings poo at the audience is not viewed with awe as a supervillain, but with contempt. If we could somehow replace our fear of violence with contempt, then maybe these attention-cravers will find a more constructive way to get their fifteen minutes.

Little Joys of Discovery #1A

     This post is just a followup of the one in which I mentioned leafcutter bees, as now I've had the chance to capture a couple of photographs of some.

      On occasion you might notice the signs of leafcutter bee activity before you see the bees themselves. This is a picture of some leaves on flowers in our garden, where you can see a few neatly cut-out sections. I'd seen this sort of thing many times before I learned of leafctter bees, and assumed some caterpillar was at work, but I was puzzled as to why it seemed to have eaten in such regular patterns and left, rather than just devouring the whole leaf.

     I didn't get a picture of any bees actually harvesting these leaves, so maybe these were done by fickle caterpillars after all, but my money's on the bees.

     When I first went outside with camera in hand, hoping to stake out a nesting site where I'd seen a bee the day before, I first crouched down to look around the porch steps to see if I could find the entrance to the nest. Then, I happened to notice that sitting right there on the step was a resting bee, complete with a piece of leaf, almost as if waiting for me to come take her picture.

 
     And as soon as I took this shot, she flew away.

     Unlike honeybees, leafcutters are not eusocial; all the females lay their own eggs, rather than tending to the eggs of their mother the queen. According to this site, all leafcutter species are solitary, but  alfalfa leafcutter bees (Megachile rotunda) are happy to build nests in close proximity to each other, which is why I think the ones in my backyard are of that species. Each of the drainage holes in the base of these flowerpots is the front door to a leafcutter's burrow; I saw bees come and go from all of them, but they're pretty quick, and it was hard to catch good still photos of any of them. I did manage to catch a little video of some, which I've put on my YouTube channel. Boy, nature photography takes patience!

 

Why do Persons Have Rights? A reader asks...

A reader emailed me with the following question: Why does a person have rights?


First of all, it's not clear they do, in the absolute cosmic sense. But if rights exist at all, then persons are the things that will have them, by definition.

Persons I define as moral agents, beings who are capable of having interests, acting upon them, and who may be said to have moral obligations in some sort. Rights are a form of moral obligation; if you have a right to life, I have a moral obligation not to kill you. If I have a moral obligation to treat you with respect, you may be said to have a right to be treated with respect. And so on.

(I'm distinguishing moral obligation from prudential reasons to do something, here. It might be in MY best interests to treat you with respect or not to kill you, but the fact that I'm better off by doing something is not what creates moral obligation.)

Now, this doesn't answer the question as to why persons have rights, or why non-persons don't have rights. I may have a moral obligation not to burn the Mona Lisa; doesn't that translate into the Mona Lisa having a right not to be burned? Well, no; I'd rather say that everyone else has a right to keep the Mona Lisa in existence, and it's that right I'd be violating, not any right the painting itself has.

So why do persons have rights? I think it goes hand in hand with the notion of personhood and moral agency, or the exercise of autonomy. We make choices base on what we feel to be right, whatever that means, and while we may not know what right is in all cases, we still have to choose. And it's autonomous agents, PERSONS who much choose. So in a practical sense, it's persons who determine what matters and what doesn't.

Your choice between chocolate or vanilla is an exercise of your will and your determination that one or the other flavour will better satisfy your interests. I presume that the satisfaction of interests is ultimately what we're interested in as choosing beings, and since persons are the seat of interests, I believe it follows that we have an obligation to defer to others with respect to their own determination of their interests. Hence it's not for me to decide whether you should have chocolate or vanilla, when it's you who are better situated to identify your interests.

It gets complicated with interests clash, and that's where rights come in. I may actually have an interest in your eating chocolate and abstaining from vanilla for some reason. (For something like this, it's probably an irrational reason, but who cares? I don't want to beg any questions about what constitutes a valid or an invalid interest. Maybe I think God hates vanilla or something, or maybe I'm deathly allergic to the presence of vanilla byproducts in the sweat of people I might shake hands with.) Rights are the way we try to balance conflicting interests, by identifying a systematic priority of interests. So there's core interests we all have in common, which we agree to treat as paramount. My right to believe God is pleased that you don't eat vanilla is, presumably, less central to the protection of my autonomy than my right to choose what flavour I eat myself, and so I must recognize that YOUR autonomous right to eat what you want trumps my pleasing-God interest. But if I'm deathly allergic to vanilla byproducts, my right to remain alive might well trump your choice of ice cream in contexts where it might make a difference.

The Greatest Trick the Devil Ever Pulled

     I just received an email from a friend of my parents with a political joke in it. Apologies for abridging it and spoiling the punchline, but the gist of it is this: A little girl calls her newborn kittens, whose eyes haven't opened yet, "Liberals", and later, when their eyes have opened, she calls them "Conservatives".

     Ha ha. Cute.

     Yet I found it troubling, because it is part of perpetuating the myth that conservatives are somehow the hard-headed realists who know how the world really works, and everyone else is a naive idealist. And that's simply false.

     The source of the confusion, of course, is the word "conservative". By itself, it's a fine word, and it's conveys an admirable sense of caution and thrift. To be conservative is to avoid unnecessary risk and expense, and these are both things that we'd want in our leaders. It's natural to hope that this kind of conservatism (cautious and thrifty) is rooted in an understanding of how very wrong things can go if we're not careful, and it's natural to import this idea that conservatives' eyes are open to the harsh realities of the world.

     But there's a danger in that assumption, and all the more so because it's so seductively reasonable. If you buy into the idea that you are wise to the ways of the world, while others are naive and gullible, you become especially naive and gullible yourself. You become smug and complacent, and feel that you don't need to listen to the ideas of those naive and gullible idealists who have no idea what the real world is like. Their eyes are closed, and yours are open, so you can't be fooled. Heck, you know how things really are, so you don't even need to look anymore...

     And that, I fear, is exactly what's happened, as evidenced by the joke I referred to at the beginning of this post. Conservatives have become so confident in their superior expertise (and the utter worthlessness of any opinion that doesn't bear the label "conservative") that they are willing to barge on ahead with policies based entirely on idealistic visions of how the economy is supposed to work, or "common sense" ideas of how the criminal justice system is supposed to work, or how foreign governments ought to respond to our clearly superior morality.

     (Our own federal Conservatives have been systematically closing their eyes by slashing funding to Statistics Canada and a host of other government agencies and research programs intended to give government and Canadians the objective information needed to make sound decisions. Republicans in the United States have been doing much the same with not just budget cuts but also legislation like the Data Quality Act.)

     The scorn I sense from conservatives in expressing their opinions about things is palpable. They talk about how obvious it is that this or that policy is the right one, and how stupid anyone would have to be not to see it. Well, if everything true was obvious, and everything obvious were true, this would be a very different world. There are things which seem obvious but are in fact false, and truths which are very subtle and profoundly counterintuitive. You cannot hope to understand these things if you think you already do.

     I love the quote from The Usual Suspects: "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." There is no surer way to keep your eyes closed than to convince yourself they're wide open.

Was the Apollo Mission a Waste of Money?

You are probably familiar with this photograph.

This very famous image of Earth was taken by the astronauts of Apollo 17. It has been seen by pretty much everybody, and has been used so much as to have become a cliché. And yet, it's still an amazingly beautiful and inspiring shot.

But was it worth all the money spent to go to the Moon? There were many people at the time who thought it was a waste, and people today still make that argument. Advocates of space exploration point out that the technologies developed as part of the Apollo program played an invaluable role in advancing our standard of living here on Earth, and there's truth to that, certainly. We have a lot of neat gadgets that we probably never would have developed had it not been for Apollo.

But I want to talk about something else. Look at that image again, and think of how often you've seen it before. It's appeared in books and magazines, T-shirts and posters, advertising campaigns... you name it. It's such a compelling image, it's used everywhere.

Now, copyright and piracy are very much on people's minds these days, and the RIAA in particular is complaining about losing staggering amounts of money to unauthorized copying. Whether their claims are accurate or not, we can agree that images like this photo have commercial value. So I'd like you to consider for a moment just how rich you'd expect to be from royalty payments if you owned the copyright to that iconic photo of the Earth.

Of course, if NASA charged royalties for the use of that photo, it probably wouldn't have been used by nearly so many people, and they almost certainly would have had the same problem that RIAA complains of when it comes to collecting from everyone who uses it. But that isn't really the point. What I want to argue is that if you were to sit down and put a dollar value on the intellectual property of that one, single photograph, taking into account how many people have used it for how many different purposes, the amount of value generated would be staggering. Now, think about these images:

NASA doesn't charge us royalties on using these images. They are part of our culture, and belong to all of us. We are richer for having them. I don't know what dollar value to put on them, but it's got to be pretty large, especially if we listen to RIAA and the film industry.

So forget about all the fancy technology we enjoy as a result of the Moon landings. I think we may even have turned a profit just on the intellectual property assets alone.

Addicted to the War on Drugs

How did we get addicted? The same way all addictions start.

We started out with a kind of moralistic malaise; there was something vaguely irksome about those people using that recreational drug. It just didn't seem wholesome. We thought we should do something about it. And so, we passed a law trying to constrain it. And ooooh, that's a good feeling. We've done something! We've taken a stand for righteousness!

Of course, that high didn't last, and after a while we begin to notice that people were still using the drug, despite the reasonable measures we took to curtail it. Sure, some stopped using it, but those who didn't were a somewhat more unsavory sort of person, not just dabbling in a recreational drug, but also defying the law. That just can't be tolerated. So we had to crack down! Enact a tougher law! Yeah, that's the stuff! Moral righteousness, there's no high like it.

And when that high wore off, we noticed that people were still using the drug, except that they'd gone underground, and a decidedly criminal element had become involved. What's more, since the ban made it hard to ship the stuff in its natural form, they started refining out and concentrating the active ingredient and smuggling that more compact product instead. Of course, that just makes the drug itself more potent and more dangerous. So we definitely needed to implement stronger enforcement measures, because good heavens, just  look at how horrible that drug is and the lives it ruins!

And before we knew it, we couldn't quit. We can't bring ourselves to face the terrifying process of easing up on our enforcement measures. These drugs are just so horrible, so bad for people, and the people involved in producing and selling them are such dangerous criminals, how could we possibly stop? No, we need stronger measures to combat these ever stronger drugs on our streets and....

Stop. That isn't going to help. Yeah, I know, we probably can't just go cold turkey. Quitting's going to be a long, difficult and painful process. But we do need to get off the stuff. We need to ease ourselves off the habit of thinking of drugs as a criminal problem, and recognize that at root, it's a health problem.

And recognizing the nature of the problem is the first step towards overcoming it.

Making Sense of the First Three Commandments

     When I was in the fifth grade, the Gideons came to my school and handed out New Testaments. I still have mine, a tiny red volume with a the Ten Commandments prominently laid out near the beginning. It was reading the third, in particular, that planted a seed of doubt in my young mind. After, all, the commandments about killing and stealing, well, those were pretty straightforward unassailable moral doctrines. I wasn't entirely sure about all of the others; I didn't understand why God would care which day of the week we took off, and as a fifth-grader I simply figured I'd defer questions on the morality of adultery until I knew what it was.
     But the second and third commandments troubled me. For one thing, "graven images" couldn't possibly mean any likeness at all, as the King James version seemed to say. Not only was I raised in an artistic household (although, to be fair, my father's paintings are kind of abstract), but the church had stained glass windows depicting apostles and saints, and there were mosaics and statues all over the place. If the people whose job it was to preach this stuff thought it was okay to make likenesses of these things, then there must be some special meaning to the word "graven" I didn't understand yet.
     The third one is what really got me angry, because unlike the "graven images" thing, everyone around me seemed to have a pretty clear idea of what it meant. It was even explained to me thusly: Don't use the name of God in a disrespectful manner. And I'd seen people scolded for saying things like "God damn it!" or "Jesus CHRIST!" as an expletive.

     Okay, I'll accept that this is a rude thing to do, I thought. But come on. Commandment #6 is "Thou shalt not kill." The ten commandments are supposed to be the ten biggies, right, the really serious important rules? How does using a mere word come anywhere close to making the list, much less coming well before murder as a no-no? I couldn't imagine that God would be so petty, so vain as to be offended by such an ordinary and commonplace utterance, much less condemn someone to eternal damnation for what he might have said after hitting his thumb with a hammer.

     Thus the seeds of doubt were planted, and eventually I found myself simply abandoning any assumption that the authors of the Bible had any more clue what they were talking about than any other mortal of the time.

     Oddly enough, it was only after becoming a de facto atheist that I began to appreciate a subtler and more important interpretation of the commandments that troubled me so, the first three. In fact, I now believe they are the three most important, for believer and non-believer alike, because they are aimed at fostering a proper sense of humility and piety (and yes, I think an atheist can be pious).

     Let's look at the first. "Thou shalt have no other gods before me." Trivially, this is no problem for the atheist to obey, because atheists have no gods at all. But more seriously, notice that it doesn't say "Thou shalt place me before other gods." It just says no other gods before God. God is frequently kind of evasive about putting into words exactly what or who He is; "I am that I am" is kind of vague. And yet, even as an atheist, perhaps even because I am an atheist, I'd insist that there is some kind of absolute, objective reality about the universe, something which for lack of a better term I'd be willing to name "God" simply because it's supreme and not subject to anything else. Or call it "Truth", if "God" is too laden with smiting and silliness. And if we put all the mythological baggage of "God" aside, then it turns out that the commandment to have no other gods before Truth becomes one that preaches a genuine piety.

     The second commandment, in my little Gideon New Testament, was explained to me as meaning not that one should never draw a picture of a flower, but that one should never make artifacts into idols. The paradigm case was right there in Exodus, where some of the Israelites made a golden calf and started worshipping it. Now, this is in a sense a violation of the first commandment, since worshipping an artifact is to have another god before God, but it's an especially tricky case, because it's so much easier to think that by genuflecting before a depiction of something, you're worshipping the thing it depicts and not the mere artifact. Yet the God of the Israelites, like the abstract Truth I mentioned in the paragraph above, is not a physical thing, and cannot be depicted at all. So it does make some sense to make it a separate commandment, which I'll restate as follows: "Never mistake a depiction of the Truth for the Truth itself." Or, to use my favourite Zen saying, "Words are a finger pointing at the moon: look at the moon, not the finger."

     Finally, the third commandment deals with a closely related impiety. It has nothing to do with speaking disrespectfully about the Big Guy, but with having the vanity to think you speak for Him. The commandments doesn't say "Thou shalt not speak the Lord's name in vain"; it says "take". What can it mean to take anyone's name, but to assume to act as an agent for them in some way? And is that not an extremely vain thing to assume, especially if it's God you claim to be speaking for?  The vitally important point here is that you do not get to speak for God, no matter what you think it is you're saying. Everything you think you know is just that: what you think you know. None of it has any divine authority, and every thing you ever say about God (especially, but anything else for that matter) should always be attended by the tacit qualifier "I think that..." or "I believe...."   You don't get to say "God hates fags"; you get to say that you believe God hates fags. You don't get to blame anything you say or think or do on the vain pretence that God told you to. For, as the second half of the commandment goes, "the Lord will not hold him guiltless that taketh His name in vain."
     That's significant, I think. None of the other commandments tack that on, that the Lord won't hold you guiltless if you steal or murder or covet. It's only taking the Lord's name in vain that gets this addendum, and I think it's because the thing that makes taking His name in vain so bad is that it makes you think you're guiltless, that you're playing it safe and just doing what God says. That's kind of the whole point of taking His name; you think you're just following orders.
     Remember Harold Camping, who predicted the world would end last year? I happened to download his PDF explaining his reasoning, which was subtitled "ANOTHER INFALLIBLE PROOF THAT GOD GIVES THAT ASSURES THE RAPTURE WILL OCCUR MAY 21, 2011".  It would have been fine for him to say, "I'm convinced the Rapture will occur, and here are my reasons," but no, he said it was GOD'S infallible proof. What vanity! What arrogance! What a grave intellectual sin, regardless of whether or not you believe there even is a God. 

     You don't need to believe God exists to see this is a sin. But you kind of need to believe God exists to be capable of committing it.