Soak the rich
'Til there are no more.
When that day comes
There'll be no more poor.
Of course, that's an over-simplification, because it is possible, in theory and at times in history, for there to be poverty w/out wealth. In our age, however, we clearly have the productive technology to adequately provide for every man, woman and child on the planet (although if the population countinues to double every 50 years, all bets are off). Poverty is therefore, in our world, the product of an unjust and undemocratic capitalist system, which orders production and distribution primarily for the needs and wishes of the well-off, and leaves immense numbers of the poor effectively w/out any voice. The solution is for people to become enlightened and rise up, throwing off the mental chains created by the lying propaganda of the Right (e.g., the concept of "Tax Freedom Day"). Progressive taxation is therefore a symptom and an instrument of the solution, and not, of course, the solution, itself.
Anyway, for me, April 15 is not so much tax day as the day my wonderful daughter arrived in our lives.
Thursday, April 15, 2010
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
Random firings
March has been a very busy month. I’ve been doing a lot, reading a lot, thinking a lot, but haven’t had time to sit down and write a coherent blog post. So I’m going to try cobbling one together out of some of my shorter journal entries for the month. I’ve been rereading Dewey’s Experience and Nature (among other things), and much in the following musings is influenced by that. The last, however, was influenced in part by discussions at a recent DSA meeting on Monte Pearson’s Perils of Empire, and by an article by Arthur MacEwan.
3/5/10
Rules of arithmetic have their properties only in virtue of the abstractness of numbers. For instance, consider X&Y chromosomes. Normal human females have two X chromosomes, normal males have one X and one Y. Thus,
F: 2 ea x 1 type = 2 chromosomes
M: 1 ea x 2 types = 2 chromosomes
Abstracted to the level of chromosomes, this gives:
2 x 1 = 1 x 2 = 2
which is valid, but the practical significance of the information lost to abstraction is far from trivial.
In general, classes of things are classes only if the difference between members is unimportant, which is a function of the analysis to be performed, and the level of abstraction appropriate to that analysis.
3/12/10
Reality is always there, it is just-as-it-is. But knowing always involves an abstraction. There is no way to know something just-as-it-is. The notion of doing so is vacuous: there is no meaningful way to understand it. The just-as-it-is cannot be inside your head. What is in your head is a pattern of neurological activity, chemicals, electricity... This neural pattern is associated with the just-as-it-is. They are linked in experience. This linkage is knowing. It involves a process of abstraction (choice from among the full range of experience presented) and analysis (ordering and associations upon the objects of choice).
3/17/10
Confusion around the concept of causation may result from applying (as a metaphor) concepts pertaining to the goal-directed action of sentient things to non-sentient nature. For us, the results of our actions come at the end of a causal chain (or intermediate results come as intermediate points on the chain). We look for the same effect in nature.
3/20/10
When we divide the world into objects, we do so along natural lines of cleavage, but these are not the only lines of cleavage, nor do we always cleave the same reality in the same way. We parse the world into objects pragmatically, in the ways that make sense to ourselves as a species, and also relative to our objectives at a given time. Some other species, or ourselves in different exigencies, would parse it differently.
3/27/10
The logic of capitalist accumulation is much like the logic of empire. If you have a (political) empire (e.g., Rome), even if you don’t consciously wish to expand, there is always trouble somewhere on the border, which entails the risk of losing some part of your existing empire. Losing part of your empire is bad, so the wise course seems to be to “pacify” the unruly neighbor, which as a practical matter means extending the empire.
In an uncertain world, maintaining your existing power is a delicate balancing act – too delicate for anyone to be confident of his ability to do it precisely. The real alternatives will always seem to be either increase your power, or tacitly allow it to recede. Since the second is unacceptable, the first course is followed by default.
In capitalism, power derives mainly from the effective control over property. (Note that this may, or may not be, coincident with formal “ownership”.) The logic of power leads one to try to maximize the power under one’s control, thus corporate growth, thus capital accumulation.
Note 1: A corollary, of sorts, is that capitalists desire to increase the prerogatives of capital, e.g. vis. labor.
Note 2: This logic of capital is very different from the logic of labor. Individual laborers may wish to increase their small store of wealth (purchasing power), but this is not their primary source of economic power. An unorganized laborer’s primary power is in her skills, strength, ability to work. If she is more politically conscious, she realizes that her real power lies in her ability to organize, both into labor unions and politically. Labor unions may accumulate some significant store of funds, but their main source of power lies in the number of workers they have organized.
Note 3: I mean “power” very broadly as the ability to independently make, or at least strongly influence, decisions affecting your life and/or the lives of others.
3/5/10
Rules of arithmetic have their properties only in virtue of the abstractness of numbers. For instance, consider X&Y chromosomes. Normal human females have two X chromosomes, normal males have one X and one Y. Thus,
F: 2 ea x 1 type = 2 chromosomes
M: 1 ea x 2 types = 2 chromosomes
Abstracted to the level of chromosomes, this gives:
2 x 1 = 1 x 2 = 2
which is valid, but the practical significance of the information lost to abstraction is far from trivial.
In general, classes of things are classes only if the difference between members is unimportant, which is a function of the analysis to be performed, and the level of abstraction appropriate to that analysis.
3/12/10
Reality is always there, it is just-as-it-is. But knowing always involves an abstraction. There is no way to know something just-as-it-is. The notion of doing so is vacuous: there is no meaningful way to understand it. The just-as-it-is cannot be inside your head. What is in your head is a pattern of neurological activity, chemicals, electricity... This neural pattern is associated with the just-as-it-is. They are linked in experience. This linkage is knowing. It involves a process of abstraction (choice from among the full range of experience presented) and analysis (ordering and associations upon the objects of choice).
3/17/10
Confusion around the concept of causation may result from applying (as a metaphor) concepts pertaining to the goal-directed action of sentient things to non-sentient nature. For us, the results of our actions come at the end of a causal chain (or intermediate results come as intermediate points on the chain). We look for the same effect in nature.
3/20/10
When we divide the world into objects, we do so along natural lines of cleavage, but these are not the only lines of cleavage, nor do we always cleave the same reality in the same way. We parse the world into objects pragmatically, in the ways that make sense to ourselves as a species, and also relative to our objectives at a given time. Some other species, or ourselves in different exigencies, would parse it differently.
3/27/10
The logic of capitalist accumulation is much like the logic of empire. If you have a (political) empire (e.g., Rome), even if you don’t consciously wish to expand, there is always trouble somewhere on the border, which entails the risk of losing some part of your existing empire. Losing part of your empire is bad, so the wise course seems to be to “pacify” the unruly neighbor, which as a practical matter means extending the empire.
In an uncertain world, maintaining your existing power is a delicate balancing act – too delicate for anyone to be confident of his ability to do it precisely. The real alternatives will always seem to be either increase your power, or tacitly allow it to recede. Since the second is unacceptable, the first course is followed by default.
In capitalism, power derives mainly from the effective control over property. (Note that this may, or may not be, coincident with formal “ownership”.) The logic of power leads one to try to maximize the power under one’s control, thus corporate growth, thus capital accumulation.
Note 1: A corollary, of sorts, is that capitalists desire to increase the prerogatives of capital, e.g. vis. labor.
Note 2: This logic of capital is very different from the logic of labor. Individual laborers may wish to increase their small store of wealth (purchasing power), but this is not their primary source of economic power. An unorganized laborer’s primary power is in her skills, strength, ability to work. If she is more politically conscious, she realizes that her real power lies in her ability to organize, both into labor unions and politically. Labor unions may accumulate some significant store of funds, but their main source of power lies in the number of workers they have organized.
Note 3: I mean “power” very broadly as the ability to independently make, or at least strongly influence, decisions affecting your life and/or the lives of others.
Sunday, February 21, 2010
Let ‘em filibuster
Almost since the beginning of his administration, I have had the gut feeling that President Obama’s bipartisan, compromise-oriented approach to legislation was a mistake. I have had endless debates with friends (especially my wife, Susan) about whether this approach was tactical on Obama’s part, or a function of some deep-seated, almost pathological need to “get along” (perhaps combined with a failure to grasp the profound significance of the underlying ideological differences). I do not pretend to be a political pundit, nor a psychoanalyst, so I won’t go further into the motivation debate. But certain effects seem fairly clear: Obama thought that by outreach and compromise, he could move legislation, including and especially health care reform, through Congress. The Republicans, on the other hand, although quick to decry partisanship when they are in power, saw their best advantage in sheer obstructionism, and this they did very well, helped by the rules of the profoundly undemocratic U.S. Senate.
In these private debates (as in my 1/17/10 blog post), I argued that Obama would have been better off to come out swinging. If he had seemed to be fighting for the little guy, and the Senate Republicans were obviously blocking his every move, then it would have been clear to everybody who the villains of the piece were. His legislation might have been blocked – but it was anyway! By being seen as a fighter, his chances of increasing the Democratic majority in the midterms would have improved.
At least in my small circle of friends on the Left, this idea of mine seems to be coming pretty widespread. People are, in fact, holding it forth as a model for how Obama should go forward. “Let ‘em filibuster” is a call I hear more and more often. At a recent discussion we organized for the Boston local of Democratic Socialists of America, all three panelists put forth an analysis that seemed, to me, strikingly similar to mine. They ended by saying that Obama needed to find some pieces of legislation, however small, that he could move, and push them through Congress quickly. I raised my hand and commented that, based on what they had said so far, it seemed like even if Obama couldn’t move anything through, it would be better for him to try and fail due to visible Republican obstructionism. Somewhat reluctantly (they didn’t want to give up the dream that Obama could pass something), all three panelists agreed.
Unfortunately, as I reflect on the outcome of the recent Massachusetts Senate election, and some other thoughts about the nature and makeup of the U.S. electorate, I have come to have some doubts about at least the short-run effectiveness of this strategy.
The AFL-CIO commissioned a poll after Scott Brown’s election, which showed some very interesting results. Among other things, it showed that nearly two-thirds of Brown’s voters want him to “be bipartisan and work with Obama and congressional Democrats, rather than stick to his conservative philosophy and work to defeat the Democrats’ agenda”. Since Brown won about 50% of the total vote, this suggests that one third of the electorate makes no deeper analysis when voting than “I’m not happy with the way things are going, so I’ll vote for the other party.”
A behavioral tendency I have noticed in many voters may partially explain these results; if it doesn’t explain them, it may mesh with them to reinforce the result. In conversations with various friends and coworkers over the years, especially people who do not see themselves as particularly “political” people, I have noticed that many people apply a very simple model to the solution of social problems. Specifically, they:
In a recession, for example, a worker may take it for granted that the problem is “getting the economy going again”, and that this necessarily entails restoring or creating jobs, and good jobs at that – anybody can see that! But someone else may think that the definition of “getting the economy going again” is a matter of profitability and a rising stock market. If he’s elected to office, the policy this second person pursues may not be oriented towards restoring good jobs. Or, the politician may think bringing back jobs is important, but believe the way to do it is by a supply side approach: cutting taxes on the rich, while practicing fiscal austerity by slashing social programs to “stabilize” the economy. This policy will have a very different effect on outcomes then the massive Keynesian stimulus that might be proposed by some other politician, who had a different theory as to the solution to the same problem.
But if you don’t understand these effects of ideology and theory on outcomes; if you simply assume that everybody sees things essentially the same way you do (always excepting a few “radicals” and “nut cases”), and that fixes to social problems are subject to well-understood technical fixes like designing a stronger beam or choosing the right wire for an electrical circuit; then it makes perfect sense to flip your vote whenever the party “in power” doesn’t seem to be able to “get it done”. With this kind of attitude, even such an obviously obstructionist strategy as a filibuster may have an unobvious effect – causing you to vote for the filibustering party, not because you agree with their positions, but because their successful obstructionism makes the other party seem unable to effectively govern.
In light of these considerations, I am no longer so certain that a “Let ‘em filibuster” strategy will do much for the Democrats’ electoral results in the short run. But I still think it is better for Obama to fight and lose than to just lose without a visible fight. The AFL-CIO poll suggests that the electorate is divided roughly into thirds – one third left leaning, one-third right leaning, and one third that flips one way or the other depending on which way the wind is blowing. The long-term objective for the Left (and for the Right, for that matter) must be to hold onto and firm up our base, while trying to educate at least some of the flip-floppers.
The Republicans have proved that they can pretty much block legislation any time they take a serious mind to. If the outcome for Obama’s agenda is to be losing in any case, then coming out fighting won’t make him seem any less effective. He may still lose the flip-flopping vote, but at least he’ll have a better chance of holding on to his base. This may lead to less of a debacle in the mid-term elections, and at least, as Republican obstructionism enrages the frustrated core of left-leaning people who know their enemy, it may give those of us who are truly on the Left a better base to work with in the future.
In these private debates (as in my 1/17/10 blog post), I argued that Obama would have been better off to come out swinging. If he had seemed to be fighting for the little guy, and the Senate Republicans were obviously blocking his every move, then it would have been clear to everybody who the villains of the piece were. His legislation might have been blocked – but it was anyway! By being seen as a fighter, his chances of increasing the Democratic majority in the midterms would have improved.
At least in my small circle of friends on the Left, this idea of mine seems to be coming pretty widespread. People are, in fact, holding it forth as a model for how Obama should go forward. “Let ‘em filibuster” is a call I hear more and more often. At a recent discussion we organized for the Boston local of Democratic Socialists of America, all three panelists put forth an analysis that seemed, to me, strikingly similar to mine. They ended by saying that Obama needed to find some pieces of legislation, however small, that he could move, and push them through Congress quickly. I raised my hand and commented that, based on what they had said so far, it seemed like even if Obama couldn’t move anything through, it would be better for him to try and fail due to visible Republican obstructionism. Somewhat reluctantly (they didn’t want to give up the dream that Obama could pass something), all three panelists agreed.
Unfortunately, as I reflect on the outcome of the recent Massachusetts Senate election, and some other thoughts about the nature and makeup of the U.S. electorate, I have come to have some doubts about at least the short-run effectiveness of this strategy.
The AFL-CIO commissioned a poll after Scott Brown’s election, which showed some very interesting results. Among other things, it showed that nearly two-thirds of Brown’s voters want him to “be bipartisan and work with Obama and congressional Democrats, rather than stick to his conservative philosophy and work to defeat the Democrats’ agenda”. Since Brown won about 50% of the total vote, this suggests that one third of the electorate makes no deeper analysis when voting than “I’m not happy with the way things are going, so I’ll vote for the other party.”
A behavioral tendency I have noticed in many voters may partially explain these results; if it doesn’t explain them, it may mesh with them to reinforce the result. In conversations with various friends and coworkers over the years, especially people who do not see themselves as particularly “political” people, I have noticed that many people apply a very simple model to the solution of social problems. Specifically, they:
- Think everybody sees the same problems they do, and sees these problems in essentially the same way, and,
- Think that the solution to these problems is essentially technical, and that there is general consensus among experts on how to solve them (even if they, themselves, don’t understand what the solution is).
In a recession, for example, a worker may take it for granted that the problem is “getting the economy going again”, and that this necessarily entails restoring or creating jobs, and good jobs at that – anybody can see that! But someone else may think that the definition of “getting the economy going again” is a matter of profitability and a rising stock market. If he’s elected to office, the policy this second person pursues may not be oriented towards restoring good jobs. Or, the politician may think bringing back jobs is important, but believe the way to do it is by a supply side approach: cutting taxes on the rich, while practicing fiscal austerity by slashing social programs to “stabilize” the economy. This policy will have a very different effect on outcomes then the massive Keynesian stimulus that might be proposed by some other politician, who had a different theory as to the solution to the same problem.
But if you don’t understand these effects of ideology and theory on outcomes; if you simply assume that everybody sees things essentially the same way you do (always excepting a few “radicals” and “nut cases”), and that fixes to social problems are subject to well-understood technical fixes like designing a stronger beam or choosing the right wire for an electrical circuit; then it makes perfect sense to flip your vote whenever the party “in power” doesn’t seem to be able to “get it done”. With this kind of attitude, even such an obviously obstructionist strategy as a filibuster may have an unobvious effect – causing you to vote for the filibustering party, not because you agree with their positions, but because their successful obstructionism makes the other party seem unable to effectively govern.
In light of these considerations, I am no longer so certain that a “Let ‘em filibuster” strategy will do much for the Democrats’ electoral results in the short run. But I still think it is better for Obama to fight and lose than to just lose without a visible fight. The AFL-CIO poll suggests that the electorate is divided roughly into thirds – one third left leaning, one-third right leaning, and one third that flips one way or the other depending on which way the wind is blowing. The long-term objective for the Left (and for the Right, for that matter) must be to hold onto and firm up our base, while trying to educate at least some of the flip-floppers.
The Republicans have proved that they can pretty much block legislation any time they take a serious mind to. If the outcome for Obama’s agenda is to be losing in any case, then coming out fighting won’t make him seem any less effective. He may still lose the flip-flopping vote, but at least he’ll have a better chance of holding on to his base. This may lead to less of a debacle in the mid-term elections, and at least, as Republican obstructionism enrages the frustrated core of left-leaning people who know their enemy, it may give those of us who are truly on the Left a better base to work with in the future.
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Abstinence
My teenage daughter and her peers, lately, are obsessed with movies and TV shows about teenagers having babies. I have watched some of this stuff with her (probably less than I should) – episodes from “The Secret Life of an American Teenager”, part of the movie “The Pregnancy Pact”. Even her new favorite show, “Life Unexpected”, is about the (implausible) consequences of teenage motherhood in the life of the baby, now a girl in her own teens. It’s not just shows for teenagers which have these themes, either – I remember an episode of the police show “Without a Trace” which would fit completely into the paradigm discussed in this essay, and that is just one more case among many.
From what I’ve seen, these shows:
1) Present abstinence-only as a legitimate moral choice, even if, as in “The Pregnancy Pact”, they may question whether it is the best one,
2) Tend to strongly argue for keeping and raising the baby as the most legitimate choice for a teenage girl ONCE pregnancy has occurred. Abortion and even adoption are strongly devalued as choices.
Within the context of the post-birth aspects of these kids’ lives, the shows do tend to show kids trying to be mature, and responsible, working hard on their relationships with friends and lovers, their own parents, and the baby’s father. This presents positive images for their teenage audience to live up to. On the other hand, since these fictional kids tend to be so good at this stuff, which in reality is so hard, even for those of us who waited until we were in mature, stable relationships (and had decent jobs), before we had our kids, that one effect is to make the “have your baby” choice seem less fraught than, in reality, it is.
But I’m particularly concerned about the growing acceptance of an abstinence-only policy as a legitimate moral choice, even if not a necessary one. In fact, abstinence-only is a bad choice, based on a false moral premise. It has absolutely no moral benefits, and tends to produce at least two bad moral outcomes.
First, I need to distinguish between abstinence-only as a policy, and simple abstinence. It is not morally wrong for a person to be sexually abstinent, if they choose to be. But abstinence-only is a policy that says the best (or only moral) way to avoid teenage pregnancy is to remain abstinent until marriage. Since effective birth-control methods are readily available in our society, there is no rational basis for this prescription. As a policy, abstinence-only “makes sense” ONLY if you accept the implicit premise that sex before marriage is morally wrong. This is the false premise on which abstinence-only is based.
Not only is sex before marriage not morally wrong, I would argue that most people SHOULD have (safe) sex before marriage. Marriage is an important decision, involving a melding of the whole complex of life choices facing two people and (yes) often the question of bringing more people into the world, who must be raised and cared for. Such an important decision should, in my opinion, be kept as free as possible from the heady influence of overactive hormones. Separating the choice to have sex from the choice to get married results in better choices about both.
Abstinence-only, even if it “works”, acts to make kids marry before they are ready. It is worth pointing out that, even on its own premises, abstinence-only is not a prescription for preventing TEENAGE pregnancy, but only PREMARITAL pregnancy. I can see no sound reason for viewing premature marriage as a moral “good” that we should design policies to foster.
And, of course, the reality is that (as even the birth-worshiping shows admit) failure of abstinence is an all-too-likely effect of a policy of abstinence-only. The TV morality plays try to gloss over the effects of such failures by depicting the noble struggles of a few fictional teens and their loving families to make their way through the forest of problems besetting them – and, yes, in real life many families do pull through, and come out all right on the other end. I have tremendous respect for the families who, caught up in this situation, manage to make it work. But a good outcome does not prove that the original choice was good. Certainly, in almost every case, the lives of teenage mothers, and their children are much, much harder than they would have been if the pregnancy had been deferred until a better time of life. In cases where other life factors are stacked against the family – factors like poverty, racism, unavailability of strong, supportive extended networks – the affected lives can essentially be ruined, as the stress caused by one bad decision leads to further bad behavior, resulting in pain and suffering for all that might have been averted with better initial judgment.
The morality plays paint a choice between evils, with teenage pregnancy, birth control, abortion and adoption all seen as ills to be weighed in the balance. But birth control is not an evil. It is a simple solution to a practical problem. Birth-control, not abstinence, is the moral choice for avoiding teenage pregnancy. And if birth control (or abstinence) fails, an early abortion or a “morning after pill” is clearly a reasonable and legitimate moral choice. As third tier possibilities, later abortion and adoption are both perfectly legitimate choices, in many cases better than bearing and raising a child for which you are not ready.
Abstinence-only, in short, is a moral position that makes sense only in the context of a Christian dream world, where the imagined word of God trumps the real-life needs of men, women and children. But sex is a normal, human act, not a sacrament, and premarital sex is not a sin. Birth control is a practical solution to an age-old problem, and is not in any way morally problematic. Insisting on a policy known to produce bad outcomes for real human beings, when a simple solution is available, is morally wrong.
In the real world, abstinence-only is not just an irrational or impractical policy. It is an immoral choice. And it should be shown to the world as such.
From what I’ve seen, these shows:
1) Present abstinence-only as a legitimate moral choice, even if, as in “The Pregnancy Pact”, they may question whether it is the best one,
2) Tend to strongly argue for keeping and raising the baby as the most legitimate choice for a teenage girl ONCE pregnancy has occurred. Abortion and even adoption are strongly devalued as choices.
Within the context of the post-birth aspects of these kids’ lives, the shows do tend to show kids trying to be mature, and responsible, working hard on their relationships with friends and lovers, their own parents, and the baby’s father. This presents positive images for their teenage audience to live up to. On the other hand, since these fictional kids tend to be so good at this stuff, which in reality is so hard, even for those of us who waited until we were in mature, stable relationships (and had decent jobs), before we had our kids, that one effect is to make the “have your baby” choice seem less fraught than, in reality, it is.
But I’m particularly concerned about the growing acceptance of an abstinence-only policy as a legitimate moral choice, even if not a necessary one. In fact, abstinence-only is a bad choice, based on a false moral premise. It has absolutely no moral benefits, and tends to produce at least two bad moral outcomes.
First, I need to distinguish between abstinence-only as a policy, and simple abstinence. It is not morally wrong for a person to be sexually abstinent, if they choose to be. But abstinence-only is a policy that says the best (or only moral) way to avoid teenage pregnancy is to remain abstinent until marriage. Since effective birth-control methods are readily available in our society, there is no rational basis for this prescription. As a policy, abstinence-only “makes sense” ONLY if you accept the implicit premise that sex before marriage is morally wrong. This is the false premise on which abstinence-only is based.
Not only is sex before marriage not morally wrong, I would argue that most people SHOULD have (safe) sex before marriage. Marriage is an important decision, involving a melding of the whole complex of life choices facing two people and (yes) often the question of bringing more people into the world, who must be raised and cared for. Such an important decision should, in my opinion, be kept as free as possible from the heady influence of overactive hormones. Separating the choice to have sex from the choice to get married results in better choices about both.
Abstinence-only, even if it “works”, acts to make kids marry before they are ready. It is worth pointing out that, even on its own premises, abstinence-only is not a prescription for preventing TEENAGE pregnancy, but only PREMARITAL pregnancy. I can see no sound reason for viewing premature marriage as a moral “good” that we should design policies to foster.
And, of course, the reality is that (as even the birth-worshiping shows admit) failure of abstinence is an all-too-likely effect of a policy of abstinence-only. The TV morality plays try to gloss over the effects of such failures by depicting the noble struggles of a few fictional teens and their loving families to make their way through the forest of problems besetting them – and, yes, in real life many families do pull through, and come out all right on the other end. I have tremendous respect for the families who, caught up in this situation, manage to make it work. But a good outcome does not prove that the original choice was good. Certainly, in almost every case, the lives of teenage mothers, and their children are much, much harder than they would have been if the pregnancy had been deferred until a better time of life. In cases where other life factors are stacked against the family – factors like poverty, racism, unavailability of strong, supportive extended networks – the affected lives can essentially be ruined, as the stress caused by one bad decision leads to further bad behavior, resulting in pain and suffering for all that might have been averted with better initial judgment.
The morality plays paint a choice between evils, with teenage pregnancy, birth control, abortion and adoption all seen as ills to be weighed in the balance. But birth control is not an evil. It is a simple solution to a practical problem. Birth-control, not abstinence, is the moral choice for avoiding teenage pregnancy. And if birth control (or abstinence) fails, an early abortion or a “morning after pill” is clearly a reasonable and legitimate moral choice. As third tier possibilities, later abortion and adoption are both perfectly legitimate choices, in many cases better than bearing and raising a child for which you are not ready.
Abstinence-only, in short, is a moral position that makes sense only in the context of a Christian dream world, where the imagined word of God trumps the real-life needs of men, women and children. But sex is a normal, human act, not a sacrament, and premarital sex is not a sin. Birth control is a practical solution to an age-old problem, and is not in any way morally problematic. Insisting on a policy known to produce bad outcomes for real human beings, when a simple solution is available, is morally wrong.
In the real world, abstinence-only is not just an irrational or impractical policy. It is an immoral choice. And it should be shown to the world as such.
Sunday, January 17, 2010
Elections and myth
I write on the eve of a Massachusetts election which may, unfortunately, be an historic one. After winning the primary, the Democratic candidate for U.S. Senate, Martha Coakley, seems to have taken the general election for granted; now, surprisingly, she finds herself in a neck-and-neck horserace with Republican Scott Brown. If Brown wins, the Senate Democrats will immediately lose any hope of breaking a filibuster; health care reform (even in its current, deformed state) will be finished, and so will any future initiative that President Obama is likely to make. It will also probably foreshadow further Democratic losses in the midterms, and likely a one-term presidency for Barack Obama. (Brown will be a one-termer, too. The progressive machine in Massachusetts will gear up belatedly, and almost certainly oust him in the next election; but a lot of damage will be done, by then.)
If Brown wins this election, it will be a wake-up call to the Democrats, but one which, like a den of opium addicts trapped in a fevered, collective dream, they probably won’t hear. The message they will hear, the message they always hear in their deluded dream state, is that when the other side wins, the Democrats need to become more like them. What the people will really be saying is: they need to be different.
Obama rode in like a hero, in the election of 2008, like a knight in shining armor for many Americans. We have two kinds of folk-tales about heroes. A hero can storm the palace gates, free the imprisoned damsel, and all will live happily ever after. Or a hero can make a vain last stand, selflessly sacrificing everything in the struggle for righteousness, fighting to the bitter end for the people, never giving up while life remains. Either type of hero wins our loyalty, our admiration, and our love. What a hero cannot do is make nice with the forces of evil. A hero cannot give in, give away everything, even in a spirit of compromise, while winning only crumbs, or nothing, for the people in return. We have a word for that kind of behavior, and it is not “heroism”. It is “betrayal”.
Unfortunately, when we feel betrayed, we don’t always act in the most rational manner. When we are jilted by our lover (to switch my metaphor), we may not choose to be cautiously celibate until a more trustworthy candidate comes along. We may, instead, troll the bars to find some even less reliable lover “on the rebound”. This is especially true if our last lover acted in a way which has made us feel of potential partners that in some sad sense “they are all the same”. Thus, the American voter. If Brown wins, it will not be because the majority of voters who jump ship to vote for him have really understood and agree with his positions; most people in Massachusetts do not. It will be because they are feeling hurt, betrayed and jilted by the Democrats, and they want to show them a thing or two.
I may be accused of elitism for analyzing the electorate on the level of fairy tale and romance novel, instead of a hard calculus of interest and agency. Perhaps the charge is just; it is true that I think most people think politically on a level of myth and passion, and not by a rational consideration of costs and benefits. Of course the forces of interest and agency are always there; but between them is interposed an analysis, and the analysis is not always sound.
This is often as true of self-conscious, politically active, over-intellectualizing “lefties” as it is of the man or woman in the street. We are as likely as anyone else to want politicians to act, out of principle, as if they were our knights in silvered armor. We want politicians who refuse ever to compromise; but of course, we also want these finely principled men and women to prevail.
The trouble is, this assumes that there IS a principled choice – that absolute victory is possible. In politics, absolute victories are likely to be the victories of a Stalin, or a Pol Pot, and even then, they don’t last forever. (I rather suspect that if any politician managed to kill off all the people who disagreed with him, he would find himself all alone – and then start arguing with himself.) People are, and always will be, contrary and cooperative, greedy and selfless, stupid and smart. Differences of opinion, conflict, error are eternally and necessarily the stuff of politics, and compromise and back room deals are part of any political solution.
So should we just wash our hands of it? Refuse to have anything to do with such a dirty business? As Howard Zinn said, in the line that went into the title of his memoirs, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train,” a deliciously mixed metaphor by which he meant that you cannot NOT make a moral choice in politics; abstention has consequences as surely as a vote, a failure to act, when action is called for, leaves us as guilty as those who acted, yet made the wrong choice. There is no redemption in taking the moral high ground, if ceding the ACTUAL ground leaves people really worse off than if you had compromised. The great irony of politics is that unshakably holding the principled position is NOT the principled position.
The problem is one of strategy, and strategy is a problem of analysis of probable outcomes. Did you compromise too soon, and therefore give away too much? Did you compromise with the wrong people, when some other compromise might have won you a better ally, and a coalition strong enough to force a breakthrough? If you had refused to engage, and spent more time building your power, would you have eventually have been able to win a better resolution? Or would you only have given your enemy, also, more time to regroup? How many people would have been hurt while you waited, and would it have been worth the cost?
History can look at the outcomes, and decide if they were good or bad. It is much harder to decide if they were good or bad relative to the actual possibilities of the moment.
Nevertheless, I fear that President Obama did the wrong thing by starting his backpedalling, his compromising, his search for bipartisan solutions, so early in his term of office. He would have been better off (I think) to draw a line in the sand, and fight, vocally and aggressively, for whatever was best for the people. If he made compromises, he should have done so from a position of strength, and made certain that he really got some quid pro quo.
Obama should have done that not because compromise is an evil to be rejected on principle, but because, in this case, compromise was bad strategy. He might have lost these battles, but if he had played a bold role, struggling against the unrelenting Republicans, he might have stayed a hero. He might have convinced people that what was needed in Washington was MORE progressive Democrats, to break the gridlock, and not that it made no difference either way, because all politicians in both parties were after all the same. He might have been our Zapata, our Leonidas at Thermopylae, our Roland at Roncesvalles sounding his horn; instead, I fear he has come to be seen as our Benedict Arnold.
The political pundits do not agree with me. To them, losing is always bad, and anything you can call a victory, no matter how Pyrrhic, is always good. Perhaps they are right. In particular, they might be right as regards the career of the particular politician seen to be losing. But then, self-sacrifice is part of the nature of being a Roland – of being a hero. I’m pretty sure we won’t make a meaningful change for the better in this country, until we manage to elect some politicians who have more faith in the power of myth than does the typical Washington insider. And who knows? If they hold out courageously in the pass, they might be pleasantly surprised and find out that the grateful people call up the cavalry just in time.
Postscript, footnote, or what-have-you. I write the above, of course, as if Obama really wants to be a progressive President, but is constrained by circumstances, which (also) he may or may not have misjudged. This is one of the accounts currently being told to explain Obama’s behavior in office. Another is that he is in fact merely another pro-business neoliberal, who pretended to believe in community empowerment (which perhaps he really believed in, in his younger days), in order to win his own place in history. I make no pretense to knowing enough about the man, Obama, to know which of these accounts is true – possibly some mixture of the two.
If Brown wins this election, it will be a wake-up call to the Democrats, but one which, like a den of opium addicts trapped in a fevered, collective dream, they probably won’t hear. The message they will hear, the message they always hear in their deluded dream state, is that when the other side wins, the Democrats need to become more like them. What the people will really be saying is: they need to be different.
Obama rode in like a hero, in the election of 2008, like a knight in shining armor for many Americans. We have two kinds of folk-tales about heroes. A hero can storm the palace gates, free the imprisoned damsel, and all will live happily ever after. Or a hero can make a vain last stand, selflessly sacrificing everything in the struggle for righteousness, fighting to the bitter end for the people, never giving up while life remains. Either type of hero wins our loyalty, our admiration, and our love. What a hero cannot do is make nice with the forces of evil. A hero cannot give in, give away everything, even in a spirit of compromise, while winning only crumbs, or nothing, for the people in return. We have a word for that kind of behavior, and it is not “heroism”. It is “betrayal”.
Unfortunately, when we feel betrayed, we don’t always act in the most rational manner. When we are jilted by our lover (to switch my metaphor), we may not choose to be cautiously celibate until a more trustworthy candidate comes along. We may, instead, troll the bars to find some even less reliable lover “on the rebound”. This is especially true if our last lover acted in a way which has made us feel of potential partners that in some sad sense “they are all the same”. Thus, the American voter. If Brown wins, it will not be because the majority of voters who jump ship to vote for him have really understood and agree with his positions; most people in Massachusetts do not. It will be because they are feeling hurt, betrayed and jilted by the Democrats, and they want to show them a thing or two.
I may be accused of elitism for analyzing the electorate on the level of fairy tale and romance novel, instead of a hard calculus of interest and agency. Perhaps the charge is just; it is true that I think most people think politically on a level of myth and passion, and not by a rational consideration of costs and benefits. Of course the forces of interest and agency are always there; but between them is interposed an analysis, and the analysis is not always sound.
This is often as true of self-conscious, politically active, over-intellectualizing “lefties” as it is of the man or woman in the street. We are as likely as anyone else to want politicians to act, out of principle, as if they were our knights in silvered armor. We want politicians who refuse ever to compromise; but of course, we also want these finely principled men and women to prevail.
The trouble is, this assumes that there IS a principled choice – that absolute victory is possible. In politics, absolute victories are likely to be the victories of a Stalin, or a Pol Pot, and even then, they don’t last forever. (I rather suspect that if any politician managed to kill off all the people who disagreed with him, he would find himself all alone – and then start arguing with himself.) People are, and always will be, contrary and cooperative, greedy and selfless, stupid and smart. Differences of opinion, conflict, error are eternally and necessarily the stuff of politics, and compromise and back room deals are part of any political solution.
So should we just wash our hands of it? Refuse to have anything to do with such a dirty business? As Howard Zinn said, in the line that went into the title of his memoirs, “You can’t be neutral on a moving train,” a deliciously mixed metaphor by which he meant that you cannot NOT make a moral choice in politics; abstention has consequences as surely as a vote, a failure to act, when action is called for, leaves us as guilty as those who acted, yet made the wrong choice. There is no redemption in taking the moral high ground, if ceding the ACTUAL ground leaves people really worse off than if you had compromised. The great irony of politics is that unshakably holding the principled position is NOT the principled position.
The problem is one of strategy, and strategy is a problem of analysis of probable outcomes. Did you compromise too soon, and therefore give away too much? Did you compromise with the wrong people, when some other compromise might have won you a better ally, and a coalition strong enough to force a breakthrough? If you had refused to engage, and spent more time building your power, would you have eventually have been able to win a better resolution? Or would you only have given your enemy, also, more time to regroup? How many people would have been hurt while you waited, and would it have been worth the cost?
History can look at the outcomes, and decide if they were good or bad. It is much harder to decide if they were good or bad relative to the actual possibilities of the moment.
Nevertheless, I fear that President Obama did the wrong thing by starting his backpedalling, his compromising, his search for bipartisan solutions, so early in his term of office. He would have been better off (I think) to draw a line in the sand, and fight, vocally and aggressively, for whatever was best for the people. If he made compromises, he should have done so from a position of strength, and made certain that he really got some quid pro quo.
Obama should have done that not because compromise is an evil to be rejected on principle, but because, in this case, compromise was bad strategy. He might have lost these battles, but if he had played a bold role, struggling against the unrelenting Republicans, he might have stayed a hero. He might have convinced people that what was needed in Washington was MORE progressive Democrats, to break the gridlock, and not that it made no difference either way, because all politicians in both parties were after all the same. He might have been our Zapata, our Leonidas at Thermopylae, our Roland at Roncesvalles sounding his horn; instead, I fear he has come to be seen as our Benedict Arnold.
The political pundits do not agree with me. To them, losing is always bad, and anything you can call a victory, no matter how Pyrrhic, is always good. Perhaps they are right. In particular, they might be right as regards the career of the particular politician seen to be losing. But then, self-sacrifice is part of the nature of being a Roland – of being a hero. I’m pretty sure we won’t make a meaningful change for the better in this country, until we manage to elect some politicians who have more faith in the power of myth than does the typical Washington insider. And who knows? If they hold out courageously in the pass, they might be pleasantly surprised and find out that the grateful people call up the cavalry just in time.
Postscript, footnote, or what-have-you. I write the above, of course, as if Obama really wants to be a progressive President, but is constrained by circumstances, which (also) he may or may not have misjudged. This is one of the accounts currently being told to explain Obama’s behavior in office. Another is that he is in fact merely another pro-business neoliberal, who pretended to believe in community empowerment (which perhaps he really believed in, in his younger days), in order to win his own place in history. I make no pretense to knowing enough about the man, Obama, to know which of these accounts is true – possibly some mixture of the two.
Saturday, December 26, 2009
Altruism and human evolution
The song "Easy to Be Hard" from the 1967 musical "Hair" posed the question: "How can people be so heartless?" Ever since Darwin, though, biologists have struggled with the opposite question: "How can people be so nice?" If traits arise through intense competition between living organisms in a war of all against all, how does a tendency to altruism arise in a population? What benefit does altruist behavior have that it contributes to the survival and reproductive success of the altruist?
How we define "altruism" is crucial to the form that the explanation will take, although the underlying facts, of course, are not changed by the definition. There is no question but that a heritable, genetic trait, in order to be selected for by natural selection, must provide some differential reproductive advantage to the gene complex coding for that trait. So if we define "altruism" as describing traits that benefit ONLY others, and confer NO adaptive advantage on either the organism bearing or the gene complex, then necessarily genes are selfish, and altruism cannot arise by natural selection. If such "altruistic" behavior in fact is not only neutral, but places the bearer at a selective disadvantage, then it cannot long survive, even if it arises by chance.
But this is a trivial result of the nature of selection, and a particular definition of "altruistic", and leaves a lot of real-life facts unexplained. Nature is full of examples of behavior that SEEMS altruistic, in the sense that it seems to be for the benefit of others, and of immediate cost to the organism exhibiting the behavior. Simply stating that there must be some hidden benefit to the organism, or at least to some of the gene complexes which code for the nature of the organism, does not explain how each particular behavior could develop.
So, rather than sacrifice a perfectly good word to preserve a trivial result (and make do, in consequence, with cumbersome phrases like "seemingly altruistic"), I prefer to define "altruistic behavior" simply as behavior that seems to benefit primarily others, at an immediate net cost to the altruistic individual. This definition of altruistic defines "fuzzier" classes of behaviors and organisms than the alternate definition, but classes that have the decided advantage that the constituent behaviors and organisms actually exist.
Elliot Sober’s book The Nature of Selection makes a strong connection between the evolution of altruistic behavior, and the process of "group selection". Group selection is a controversial concept among biologists, part of what Sober refers to as the "unit of selection" debate. The question is on what entities or "units" does natural selection work? The oldest tradition, starting with Darwin, focus on the organism (or phenotype). Individual organisms vary in traits, and have different rates of survival and reproduction deriving from those traits, causing certain types of organisms, with certain combinations of traits, to be "selected" as being better adapted to their environment, and others to die out.
Other candidates for the unit of selection exist. Many biologists have strongly argued for the individual gene as the only proper unit to be considered. Others extend this to complexes of genes. More lately, some theorists have argued for selection at the level of the group or "deme", or even at the species level. I won’t go into detail on all this. Sober argues strongly for a multi-level view; i.e., that all of these may be, from time to time, the level at which selection operates, and the particulars must be carefully examined in each case. In particular, he argues that the "genes only" school arises as a trivial result of the fact that the mathematics in each case can be reduced to calculations based on the averaged relative fitness of each gene. But to really understand the process, he believes you have to look at causality – at what level are the actual natural forces shaping evolution being applied?
The way Sober defines "group selection", there must be a trait or property definable only at the group level which confers a selective advantage on individual organisms. There is actually some flexibility in whether the "benchmark" of selection is the individual organism, a particular gene or gene complex, or the group, but focusing on the organism will do for now. The crucial feature is that the property that confers the selective advantage must be definable only at the group level. For instance, predators may avoid large individuals, but show even more aversion to groups of large animals; in that case, being a member of group of organisms with a large average size will confer a selective advantage to each organism in the group, irrespective of its own, individual size. There may be other selective effects in operation. For example, if smaller size happens to confer some selective advantage on organisms competing with other organisms within the group, then there will be two countervailing evolutionary forces at work, and the result is indeterminate (in the mathematical sense that one must look to other factors for a resolution), but this does not alter the fact that there is a group selective force at work.
Altruism seems, at least in many cases, to be a situation where group selection and individual selection act at cross purposes. Since altruists help other group members, there is a significant selective advantage to being a member of a group containing a large number of altruists. But this advantage accrues to selfish individuals, as well as to altruistic ones. Since selfish individuals gain the selective advantages of group membership without the personal costs, they may have a higher "fitness" value for intra-group competition. Which one wins out – whether selfish organisms or altruistic ones will predominate or "go to fixation" (one trait driving the other into extinction) – will depend on the relative strength of the two forces. The existence of individual (organism-level) selection as a countervailing force leads to an inherent instability in the fitness of altruism based on group selection, absent other forces.
I am mostly concerned with the evolution of altruistic behavior within primate species, and in particular within our own. I think group selection, as Sober defines it, is a large factor in this, but I think other factors can be identified, reinforcing what otherwise might seem to be an inadequately strong effect. One such factor is kin selection. Kin selection is a more powerful force than group selection, because an individual’s genes benefit more directly from the individual’s actions. This effect is most strong when I act for the benefit of my (biological) offspring. Even if I sacrifice my life for my children, this may well preserve my genotype much more effectively than had I failed to take the risk. The force of kin selection is somewhat less strong when I act for the benefit of siblings, who generally share most of my genetic material, and so on with decreasing force through first cousins, second cousins etc. I suspect that altruistic behavior may have originated, very early in the evolution of primate lineages, as a generalization of kin-selective behavior. Once it evolved, the group-selection advantages – the increase in fitness experienced by each individual member of a cooperative group – would have exercised at least a weak selective effect.
I think sex selection (selection by females of certain preferred traits in sexual partners) may also have played a part in the evolution of certain types of altruistic behavior, particularly in hominid lineages. Humans are unique in that our infants require a great deal of care – more care, and for a longer period than other primates, possibly more than any other animal. Stephen J. Gould has connected this to the neotenous nature of our species – we retain as adults, features that are infantile in other apes – for instance we continue to learn at a higher rate through much of our lives. But also we are born at a less developed stage. This may be in part because of our large brain size – a more fully developed brain and skull would be too large to pass through the birth canal.
For whatever reason, the result has been that human infants require much care, over a long period. This has led to other evolutionary changes; for example, it very likely led to the "always on" nature of human female sexuality. Other primate females, unlike human women, are interested in sex, and sexually interesting to males, only during the period in which they are fertile. By making sexuality a constant, hominid females could attract males to serve as ongoing helpmates, if not actually helping much with child rearing tasks (then or now), at least supplementing the female’s efforts in other areas, such as providing food and protection when the female was engaged with the child. This would have led to a tendency on the part of females to select for at least certain types of altruistic behavior, those that could fall under the rubric of being a "good provider". Constant sexuality, and the resulting pair-bonding, also led to another revolution – awareness of paternity, thereby extending the possible scope of kin selection.
Another factor I think played a big effect in the evolution of altruistic behavior, not only in human lineages but in other primates as well, at least those most closely related to us, such as gorillas and chimpanzees, is something we might call police action. Part of primate altruism involves cooperation and sharing – but it is not strictly necessary that these benefits be equally distributed between altruists and selfish individuals. Groups of individuals can choose NOT to share with individuals they don’t feel to be deserving. Groups can also band together to limit the power of otherwise dominant individuals who are perceived as abusing their power, and in extreme cases can even drive a selfish individual from the overall group. Evolution of policing behaviors would strongly support the group-selective benefits deriving from the evolution of altruistic forces, by lessening the selective advantage enjoyed by selfish individuals within the group, and the combination of traits would thus tend to be much more stable than altruism alone.
I’m no population geneticist, and I’m not going to be able to put together mathematical models to demonstrate all this, but it seems to me that these factors: kin selection, group selection, sex selection and evolution of cooperating behavior complexes (policing) together make up a sufficiently powerful set of forces to be adequate to ensure the evolution by natural selection of human altruism. The details I’ve laid out may not be quite right, but something like this history must be have occurred – because, indisputably, human altruism exists.
The lyric from "Hair" teaches us one important lesson: how natural all this seems to us. Because (saving a few who have imbibed too much Libertarian philosophy), we all tend to respond in the way the lyric suggests – we are surprised and startled by "heartlessness". By and large, in our day-to-day activities, we humans are more likely to go out of our way to be nice to each other than to be mean. Granted, exemplary occurrences of altruism are remarkable, and inspire awe and admiration, but it is meanness that shocks us, nags at our consciousness, and leaves us with the conviction that something must be done.
How we define "altruism" is crucial to the form that the explanation will take, although the underlying facts, of course, are not changed by the definition. There is no question but that a heritable, genetic trait, in order to be selected for by natural selection, must provide some differential reproductive advantage to the gene complex coding for that trait. So if we define "altruism" as describing traits that benefit ONLY others, and confer NO adaptive advantage on either the organism bearing or the gene complex, then necessarily genes are selfish, and altruism cannot arise by natural selection. If such "altruistic" behavior in fact is not only neutral, but places the bearer at a selective disadvantage, then it cannot long survive, even if it arises by chance.
But this is a trivial result of the nature of selection, and a particular definition of "altruistic", and leaves a lot of real-life facts unexplained. Nature is full of examples of behavior that SEEMS altruistic, in the sense that it seems to be for the benefit of others, and of immediate cost to the organism exhibiting the behavior. Simply stating that there must be some hidden benefit to the organism, or at least to some of the gene complexes which code for the nature of the organism, does not explain how each particular behavior could develop.
So, rather than sacrifice a perfectly good word to preserve a trivial result (and make do, in consequence, with cumbersome phrases like "seemingly altruistic"), I prefer to define "altruistic behavior" simply as behavior that seems to benefit primarily others, at an immediate net cost to the altruistic individual. This definition of altruistic defines "fuzzier" classes of behaviors and organisms than the alternate definition, but classes that have the decided advantage that the constituent behaviors and organisms actually exist.
Elliot Sober’s book The Nature of Selection makes a strong connection between the evolution of altruistic behavior, and the process of "group selection". Group selection is a controversial concept among biologists, part of what Sober refers to as the "unit of selection" debate. The question is on what entities or "units" does natural selection work? The oldest tradition, starting with Darwin, focus on the organism (or phenotype). Individual organisms vary in traits, and have different rates of survival and reproduction deriving from those traits, causing certain types of organisms, with certain combinations of traits, to be "selected" as being better adapted to their environment, and others to die out.
Other candidates for the unit of selection exist. Many biologists have strongly argued for the individual gene as the only proper unit to be considered. Others extend this to complexes of genes. More lately, some theorists have argued for selection at the level of the group or "deme", or even at the species level. I won’t go into detail on all this. Sober argues strongly for a multi-level view; i.e., that all of these may be, from time to time, the level at which selection operates, and the particulars must be carefully examined in each case. In particular, he argues that the "genes only" school arises as a trivial result of the fact that the mathematics in each case can be reduced to calculations based on the averaged relative fitness of each gene. But to really understand the process, he believes you have to look at causality – at what level are the actual natural forces shaping evolution being applied?
The way Sober defines "group selection", there must be a trait or property definable only at the group level which confers a selective advantage on individual organisms. There is actually some flexibility in whether the "benchmark" of selection is the individual organism, a particular gene or gene complex, or the group, but focusing on the organism will do for now. The crucial feature is that the property that confers the selective advantage must be definable only at the group level. For instance, predators may avoid large individuals, but show even more aversion to groups of large animals; in that case, being a member of group of organisms with a large average size will confer a selective advantage to each organism in the group, irrespective of its own, individual size. There may be other selective effects in operation. For example, if smaller size happens to confer some selective advantage on organisms competing with other organisms within the group, then there will be two countervailing evolutionary forces at work, and the result is indeterminate (in the mathematical sense that one must look to other factors for a resolution), but this does not alter the fact that there is a group selective force at work.
Altruism seems, at least in many cases, to be a situation where group selection and individual selection act at cross purposes. Since altruists help other group members, there is a significant selective advantage to being a member of a group containing a large number of altruists. But this advantage accrues to selfish individuals, as well as to altruistic ones. Since selfish individuals gain the selective advantages of group membership without the personal costs, they may have a higher "fitness" value for intra-group competition. Which one wins out – whether selfish organisms or altruistic ones will predominate or "go to fixation" (one trait driving the other into extinction) – will depend on the relative strength of the two forces. The existence of individual (organism-level) selection as a countervailing force leads to an inherent instability in the fitness of altruism based on group selection, absent other forces.
I am mostly concerned with the evolution of altruistic behavior within primate species, and in particular within our own. I think group selection, as Sober defines it, is a large factor in this, but I think other factors can be identified, reinforcing what otherwise might seem to be an inadequately strong effect. One such factor is kin selection. Kin selection is a more powerful force than group selection, because an individual’s genes benefit more directly from the individual’s actions. This effect is most strong when I act for the benefit of my (biological) offspring. Even if I sacrifice my life for my children, this may well preserve my genotype much more effectively than had I failed to take the risk. The force of kin selection is somewhat less strong when I act for the benefit of siblings, who generally share most of my genetic material, and so on with decreasing force through first cousins, second cousins etc. I suspect that altruistic behavior may have originated, very early in the evolution of primate lineages, as a generalization of kin-selective behavior. Once it evolved, the group-selection advantages – the increase in fitness experienced by each individual member of a cooperative group – would have exercised at least a weak selective effect.
I think sex selection (selection by females of certain preferred traits in sexual partners) may also have played a part in the evolution of certain types of altruistic behavior, particularly in hominid lineages. Humans are unique in that our infants require a great deal of care – more care, and for a longer period than other primates, possibly more than any other animal. Stephen J. Gould has connected this to the neotenous nature of our species – we retain as adults, features that are infantile in other apes – for instance we continue to learn at a higher rate through much of our lives. But also we are born at a less developed stage. This may be in part because of our large brain size – a more fully developed brain and skull would be too large to pass through the birth canal.
For whatever reason, the result has been that human infants require much care, over a long period. This has led to other evolutionary changes; for example, it very likely led to the "always on" nature of human female sexuality. Other primate females, unlike human women, are interested in sex, and sexually interesting to males, only during the period in which they are fertile. By making sexuality a constant, hominid females could attract males to serve as ongoing helpmates, if not actually helping much with child rearing tasks (then or now), at least supplementing the female’s efforts in other areas, such as providing food and protection when the female was engaged with the child. This would have led to a tendency on the part of females to select for at least certain types of altruistic behavior, those that could fall under the rubric of being a "good provider". Constant sexuality, and the resulting pair-bonding, also led to another revolution – awareness of paternity, thereby extending the possible scope of kin selection.
Another factor I think played a big effect in the evolution of altruistic behavior, not only in human lineages but in other primates as well, at least those most closely related to us, such as gorillas and chimpanzees, is something we might call police action. Part of primate altruism involves cooperation and sharing – but it is not strictly necessary that these benefits be equally distributed between altruists and selfish individuals. Groups of individuals can choose NOT to share with individuals they don’t feel to be deserving. Groups can also band together to limit the power of otherwise dominant individuals who are perceived as abusing their power, and in extreme cases can even drive a selfish individual from the overall group. Evolution of policing behaviors would strongly support the group-selective benefits deriving from the evolution of altruistic forces, by lessening the selective advantage enjoyed by selfish individuals within the group, and the combination of traits would thus tend to be much more stable than altruism alone.
I’m no population geneticist, and I’m not going to be able to put together mathematical models to demonstrate all this, but it seems to me that these factors: kin selection, group selection, sex selection and evolution of cooperating behavior complexes (policing) together make up a sufficiently powerful set of forces to be adequate to ensure the evolution by natural selection of human altruism. The details I’ve laid out may not be quite right, but something like this history must be have occurred – because, indisputably, human altruism exists.
The lyric from "Hair" teaches us one important lesson: how natural all this seems to us. Because (saving a few who have imbibed too much Libertarian philosophy), we all tend to respond in the way the lyric suggests – we are surprised and startled by "heartlessness". By and large, in our day-to-day activities, we humans are more likely to go out of our way to be nice to each other than to be mean. Granted, exemplary occurrences of altruism are remarkable, and inspire awe and admiration, but it is meanness that shocks us, nags at our consciousness, and leaves us with the conviction that something must be done.
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Sober's causation
I have almost finished reading Elliot Sober's The Nature of Selection. It is a complex book, which inspired many marginal notes and a number of journal entries, and which I am sure I will need to come back to more than once to fully appreciate. With some temerity, perhaps, I have decided to address a couple of issues related to this book in my next couple of posts on this blog. This week, I am going to reflect on an idea about causality that Sober puts forth. Next week, hopefully, I will revisit the evolution of altruism, which I have discussed before (9/28/09).
Sober's causality claim relates specifically to what he calls "population level" causality, as distinguished from "individual level" causality. An example he uses to illustrate this difference is: suppose a golfer is trying to sink a putt, and a squirrel runs by after he hits the ball, and kicks it. Improbably, the ball deflects off of some obstruction, but sinks in the hole, anyway. From an individual level, we would wish to say that the squirrel's kick caused the ball to sink in the hole, because it started a chain of events that resulted in the ball sinking. But from a population level, we would not wish to say that "squirrel kicks sink balls," because we are convinced that, usually, this would not happen.
On the population level, Sober first points out, non-controversially, that causality is not implied by correlation. My own favorite example illustrating this truism is the theory that fire fighters cause damage at fires. It is observed that damage at fires is positively correlated with the number of fire fighters that arrive at the scene. If correlation is taken as proof of causation, the conclusion is that fire fighters cause damage. In fact, of course, the number of fire fighters and the amount of damage are correlated because they have a common background cause - the intensity of the fire.
Sober believes that by strengthening the criteria, it is possible to derive a probability-based definition of population-level causation. The rule he argues for is this: an event x is a (positive) causal factor of an event y if the probability of y given x is greater than or equal to the probability of y given (not-x) under all possible background conditions, and the inequality is a strict inequality in at least one condition. In other words (or, rather, in symbols):
x CF y <=> ∀z (P(y|x ⋅ z) ≥ P(y|!x ⋅ z)) ⋅ ∃z (P(y|x ⋅ z) > P(y|!x ⋅ z))
Here I am defining the relation "CF" given by "x is a causal factor of y". I will be using the dot operator both for the logical "and" between propositions and the probabilistic conjunction of events, and also using ! for a logical "not" and for negating an event (the event !x is the event that x does not occur). This should be contextually unambiguous. Hopefully your browser will display the symbols properly - if not, you may need to change your character set to "UTF-8". I've tested it with both Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox 3.5.6. (Firefox, annoyingly, sticks extra space above and below all equations, leading to very ugly page renderings.)
The reason for the universal modifier on the first part of the above expression is interesting. Sober argues that it is not enough for causality to increase the likelihood of an event in most circumstances, but decrease it in others (even in a minority of cases). If you allow any negative cases, he argues, the causality claim reduces to P(y|x) > P(y|!x), which simply represents correlation. So to have a definition of causality stronger than mere correlation, the first event must raise the probability of the second event, or be neutral, in all circumstances, and must positively raise it (strict inequality) in at least one.
Sober raises some issues with the above formulation regarding the causal independence of the background issues from the factor being examined. Specifically, he requires that the "background events" (z) not be "causally relevant" (either positively or negatively) to the proposed cause being investigated (x). If they are, this leads to undefined conditional probabilities of the form
x CF y <=> ∀z (z ∈ B => P(y|x ⋅ z) ≥ P(y|!x ⋅ z)) ⋅ ∃z (z ∈ B ⋅ (P(y|x ⋅ z) > P(y|!x ⋅ z)))
B = {z: !(x CF z) ⋅ !(z CF x) ⋅ !(x CF !z) ⋅ !(z CF !x) ⋅ (z ≠ x) ⋅ (z ≠ y)}
The last two inequalities are necessary to avoid undefined conditional probabilities in P(y|!x ⋅ x), and because the strict inequality P(y|x ⋅ y) > P(y|!x ⋅ y) is always false.
The set notation above is kind of nasty, because it carries the "free variables" x and y outside of the expression. But we can eliminate this notation by expanding the independence criterion in place (although it gets a little unwieldy):
x CF y <=> ∀z ((!(x CF z) ⋅ !(z CF x) ⋅ !(x CF !z) ⋅ !(z CF !x) ⋅ (z ≠ x) ⋅ (z ≠ y)) => P(y|x ⋅ z) ≥ P(y|!x ⋅ z))
⋅ ∃z ((!(x CF z) ⋅ !(z CF x) ⋅ !(x CF !z) ⋅ !(z CF !x) ⋅ (z ≠ x) ⋅ (z ≠ y)) ⋅ (P(y|x ⋅ z) > P(y|!x ⋅ z)))
Now that certainly looks circular. I hesitate only because I'm not 100% certain that it is impossible to iteratively expand the "CF" terms, at least in a finite universe. I took a stab at it in a universe containing only 4 events {x, y, B1, B2}, but the problem quickly exceeded my limited powers of symbolic manipulation. But, anyway, I think the definition is circular.
Actually, I don't know why I even bother to fret over it, since Sober actually admits that it is a circular definition - but he argues that it is a useful definition, anyway. Hs references a 1979 Nous article by N. Cartwright, which supposedly goes into this in more depth. It would be interesting to read that, but I have no easy way of tracking it down.
I am not going to dispute that a definition can be conceptually useful, even if circular, outside certain strictly formal contexts. But I think we need to ask in each case where does the circularity come from, and why it is necessary, and/or useful. In this case, I have a suspicion that it is because we have an underlying, intuitive definition of causation that has nothing to do with the definition that is being attempted, here. This is also reflected in my sense that this idea is only useful if we "prune" it somehow, as suggested by my reference to a "finite universe" above. For another example of pruning, I think we are only interested in background conditions that have some causal effect, themselves - totally neutral conditions are not interesting. In other words:
B = {z: !(x CF z) ⋅ !(z CF x) ⋅ !(x CF !z) ⋅ !(z CF !x) ⋅ (z ≠ x) ⋅ (z ≠ y) ⋅ (z CF y)}
But how do we prune the universe of possible events, other than applying some other, a priori, theory of causation? And in that case, how is Sober's causation test any different then just using correlation as an empirical test of the a priori theory?
I'd be the first to admit that my reasoning above is a little mushy. But a specific example, I think, shows that Sober's definition doesn't quite jibe with our intuitive ideas about causation, and may not ultimately be satisfactory as a definition of population-level causation.
Imagine a rectangular pool table, with the long axis oriented north-south. From time to time, billiard balls are introduced approximately on the 1/3rd line (the imaginary line dividing the southern 1/3 of the table from the northern 2/3). Some of these balls will be struck with a cue. The horizontal angle with which the cue strikes the ball is normally distributed such that 90% of the variation is w/in ± 70 degrees of the mean, which is to the north. There is friction in the table, and spin (variation in the incident angle of the cue with respect to the radial angles from the center of the balls to the point of impact), and the impulse imparted by the cue is finite, so that a ball may strike a side wall, or other obstruction, and come to rest before hitting the north wall. As balls accumulate, they may strike, or be struck by, other balls. Impacts are approximately elastic (with frictional/damping losses). Additionally, a number of bumpers are introduced between the 1/3rd line and the north wall. The precise position of the bumpers is varied, from time to time. Usually, when a ball strikes a bumper, it will be a glancing blow, and the ball will continue in a generally northerly direction; however, occasionally the impact will be square enough that the ball will rebound to the south. This rebound may be sufficient to carry the ball south of the 1/3 line (e.g., if the obstruction is close to the line).
Finally, the entire table will be lifted and tilted, from time to time (but infrequently), either to north or to south, with the conditional probability of a southward tilt, given that a tilt occurs, equal to 50%. The tilt is of finite (temporal) duration - i.e., there is a probability greater than zero but less than 1 that a ball on the table will reach the south wall during a south tilt. Note that any ball which has ended up south of the 1/3rd line due to a rebound has a greater probability of touching the south wall during a southward tilt than it did when it was first introduced into the game.
When a ball strikes either the north or south wall, it is removed from the game. Its probability of striking the other wall, at that point, is zero.
It is hard to say that, in this game, the impact of the cue is not a "causal factor" in increasing the percentage of the ball population that touches the north wall, even though there are some members of "B" (combinations of bumper location, ball position, cue angle, other factors) under which the impact will, in fact REDUCE the probability of reaching the north wall. But by Sober's definition of causality we would, in fact, need to make that claim.
I find myself inclined to throw out Sober's definition, or rather, to view it only as a sort of statistical test of some underlying idea of causality. I'm inclined, further, to view population-level causation as just an aggregation of individual causation-events (including those that have actually occurred, plus hypotheticals). "Squirrel kicks cause balls to sink sometimes, but most of the time they don't." So squirrel kicks are not considered a "cause" of successful putts, at the population level.
I don't think this has a negative affect on Sober's substantive arguments about the nature of selection. His arguments about "units of selection", for example, depend on the distinction between "selection of" some kind of entity and "selection for" some specific quality or trait. The question is, at what level does the cause of the selection operate? One (admittedly artificial) example he uses for illustration is to postulate several groups of otherwise similar organisms which are homogenous within each group with respect to some quality - say tallness - but vary between groups. Suppose some predator differentially picks off the shorter organisms. Is this an example of group selection (the predator is selecting organisms from groups of short organisms), or individual selection (the predator selects shorter organisms)? The question cannot be resolved strictly by looking at results, because in either case there is selection of the same organisms. One needs to look at the cause - what trait is being selected for? Does the predator simply favor shorter animals? Or does it avoid tall groups of animals? A test of the causal assumptions would be to examine what would happen if a shorter organism happened to be found in a taller group. Would it be subject to the same level of predation as if it were in a group of small organisms? In that case, the individual selection model would be supported. Or would it have the same security as its taller group members? In that case, a group selection mechanism is indicated. Of course, this test might be empirically impossible, if this were a real-life example, but it illustrates the role that a concept of causality plays in determining the unit of selection. I see no way, though, in which this argument depends on Sober's specific formulation of his law for population-level causality.
P.S. I am not 100% certain how I feel about the explanatory necessity of the concept of "causation". For instance, if I say "an object subject to a given force F will experience an acceleration proportional to its mass", does it add anything useful to the explanation to say "the force causes the object to accelerate"? The idea of cause is important to Sober, and he bases a lot of his "units of selection" arguments on the concept. I have no dogmatic objection to this, but I can't help but wonder if the concept of causation isn't somehow reducible.
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