Shaun Kenney

…the problem of which, of course, is that the machines the politicians (and the media — Washington Post included) have spun up around themselves make this sort of “civility” an impossible task:

Today, however, political purists from both sides openly sneer at the idea of going to a dinner party. Who wants to risk hearing a viewpoint different from his own or be forced to defend her beliefs without the benefit of talking points? Politicians say they’re too busy to socialize, citing the demands of travel to their districts, the increasing unpredictability of the congressional calendar and the absence of their spouses. The last is a particular blow: That fewer government spouses live in Washington means another source of political friend-making is lost, and it’s a loss as well for the city charities that traditionally relied on congressional spouses for fundraising leadership (in return for providing venues for gracious bipartisan mingling).

Thus cries for such civil conversation tend to fall of deaf ears, especially when this sort of eavesdropping tends to be the result from an overeager reporter or blogger bottomfeeding for news.

Cato the Elder over at Too Conservative dispels the concerns over the Standard and Poor’s downgrading of America’s capacity to repay debts — and he’s absolutely right:

The point of the above is to illustrate that there is no way in hell that any Eurozone country should be rated AAA if standards apply uniformly. France is horribly exposed to PIIGS debt, you need to suspend all disbelief to accept that they are more creditworthy than the United States. If you’re going to downgrade the Fed because they hold AA+ debt, then how in the world can you not downgrade the ECB, which is sitting on hundreds of billions in junk paper from places like Greece and Portugal (not to mention all the insolvent banks). Look, our finances could be better. We need to fundamentally transform the tax code and have a conversation about how much medical care we want and how we intend to pay for it but it is all manageable. The optics on the debt ceiling discussion were awful, I get that, but S&P just demonstrated that they don’t understand politics. In my view, they’re being very inconsistent in the application and have failed incorrectly assessing the credit risk of U.S. debt. Incorrect credit risk assessment is not affordable and justified when anyone can easily get industry leading credit risk analysis for much-needed answers.

So what does all this mean for people like you and I? For starters, we now have a split rating. Moodys and Fitch still have us rated AAA. If we were a high-grade corporate the split would make little to no difference in how the bond trades. Secondly, large institutions have pledged approximately 4 trillion in Treasuries as collateral. Normally a move from AAA to AA+ would not trigger any covenants for them to raise requirements (in other words, when you pledge an AAA rated instrument as collateral and say it drops to A you need to come up with more collateral) and besides that the Fed (which in this case is the regulator) basically said “we don’t care” to S&P so I don’t foresee a scenario where financial institutions are under any real increased stress to meet requirements. Will this result in higher borrowing costs? Who knows, but I can tell you three things 1.) people looking for AAA rated debt have very few places they can go to get it (see above graphic) 2.) AA+ is still considered strong, investment grade debt and 3.) when some of our largest corporations like Berkshire and GE lost their AAA investors shrugged and their borrowing costs actually dropped. Again, not saying this will or won’t happen, but 99 times out of 100 ratings agencies are late to the party and the risk has already been priced.

Worth reading in its entirely, not only because it’s right, but because it is the best overview of the entire Eurozone debt crisis (as well as the precarious position of the PIIGS and BRICs).

From your friendly folks at First Things:

Using some sophisticated statistical techniques, Burkhauser, Larrimore, and Simon then correct for these factors, and find that, using this more accurate measure of economic resources, the American middle class has done quite well over time, including during the last business cycle of 2000-2007. They write, “When using our broadest measure of available resources—post-tax, post-transfer size-adjusted household income including the ex-ante value of in-kind health insurance benefits—median income growth of individual Americans improves to 36.7 percent over the period from 1979 to 2007, and by 4.8 percent between 2000 and 2007.” In other words, contra Stiglitz, middle class Americans have made substantial gains over the relevant periods. They have gotten richer—in fact, quite a bit richer—and not poorer.

Read it all.

Farmers in Oklahoma are struggling to meet the drought:

The news from Oklahoma is that the drought is “officially” extreme, over half the state, and getting worse everywhere else. The fact that we don’t see giant dust clouds in the air is a testimony to what farmers have learned since the 1930s, but the problems that drought presents to rural producers and communities remain the same today as they were in the 1930s.

Elsewhere, the problem is too much water. Heavy rains are followed by extreme floods. People speak of “500 year flood events” and hundreds of thousands of fertile acres are underwater. There are rumors of foreclosures and transnational financial interests attempting to get control of major tracts of farm land. While a flood can be a bringer of fertility (think of the Nile and Egypt), one wonders about the consequences for farmland of the flooding of a river like the Mississippi in our area, which concentrates the toxic run-offs from a dozen states and thousands of municipalities, to the point that each year there is a growing “dead zone” where the river empties into the Gulf.

Here in Virginia, we’ve had a literal bumper crop of just about everything — tomatoes, cucumbers, corn, tomatillos, beans, peas — you name it.

Of course, there are some who will chalk this seemingly endless river of bad news up to “climate change” without being specific to whether it is man-made or natural.  Insofar as aquifers are concerned, we are certainly doing ourselves harm in a tragedy of the commons.  Nevertheless, the lesson here is to understand that catastrophe is inevitable, and one should be thoroughly prepared for any event.

Of course, the writers here touch on the effects such climate change has on the productivity of the average farmer… or the average person, for that matter:

Every mother cow sold into the marketplace is the destruction of productive wealth. That mother cow will produce no more mother cows or steers. The destruction of productive wealth is not good for farmers and ranchers and it’s not good for rural communities and it’s not good for our urban communities either. It’s called “eating your capital” and is a sign of desperation wherever it occurs.

What happens at your house when there’s less money? What happens if it becomes a permanent decline because some of your productive effort is simply no longer there? What can people in cities do about this?

Read on.  The lessons apply the same as with your household… if not, perhaps, the ends.

I love reading Lew Rockwell’s daily e-mail.  I don’t always agree with the articles he passes along, but they are always good for thought.

This one just happens to be one with which I vehemently disagree, where Walter Williams criticizes Rep. Charlie Rangel’s admonishment regarding the 3/5 compromise:

My questions for those who condemn the three-fifths compromise are: Would blacks have been better off if slaves had been counted as a whole person? Should the North not have compromised at all and a union not have come into being? Would Rangel and Sharpton have agreed with Southerners at the Constitutional Convention, who argued slaves should “stand on an equality with whites” in determining congressional representation and Electoral College votes? Abolitionist Frederick Douglass understood the compromise, saying that the three-fifths clause was “a downright disability laid upon the slaveholding states” that deprived them of “two-fifths of their natural basis of representation.”

Now I can understand if someone chooses to make a “presentist” argument that the southern Founding Fathers were implacably wedded to the institution of slavery.  To argue, on the other side of the coin, that this failure of the Founding Fathers to eliminate slavery and live up to their ideals is somehow an attack on the Constitution?

Here’s my hypothesis about people who use slavery to trash the Founders: They have contempt for our constitutional guarantees of liberty. Slavery is merely a convenient moral posturing tool as they try to reduce respect for our Constitution.

…is absurd.

Call a spade a spade — slavery was an abomination.  Those who practiced and defended the institution did so at the cost of 600,000 American lives as North and South fought bitterly over “states rights” to keep their chattel property enslaved.  The aftermath of economic enslavement that followed physical liberation through Jim Crow laws and segregation only compounded the problem.

Today, we still struggle against inequalities of opportunity, even as we implicitly grant inequalities of outcome (and in a society that prizes free markets and meritocracy, hope that those who can excel will do so).

Nothing could be more antithetical to the American experiment than stripping away the rights of fellow human beings.  Slavery was one of those dichotomies… and Rangel is right to remind Americans of this historical injustice.

?”The book – the physical paper book – is being circled by a shoal of sharks,” argues Johann Hari.

…with sales down 9 per cent this year alone. It’s being chewed by the e-book. It’s being gored by the death of the bookshop and the library. And most importantly, the mental space it occupied is being eroded by the thousand Weapons of Mass Distraction that surround us all. It’s hard to admit, but we all sense it: it is becoming almost physically harder to read books.

In his gorgeous little book The Lost Art of Reading – Why Books Matter in a Distracted Time, the critic David Ulin admits to a strange feeling. All his life, he had taken reading as for granted as eating – but then, a few years ago, he “became aware, in an apartment full of books, that I could no longer find within myself the quiet necessary to read”. He would sit down to do it at night, as he always had, and read a few paragraphs, then find his mind was wandering, imploring him to check his email, or Twitter, or Facebook. “What I’m struggling with,” he writes, “is the encroachment of the buzz, the sense that there’s something out there that merits my attention.”

It’s not just the printed word being threatened by all things modern media: e-mail, Twitter, Facebook… all are part of the ADHD information war tugging at our modern world.

“Most would understand the phrase that the mind of More was like a diamond that a tyrant threw away into a ditch, because he could not break it.” — G.K. Chesterton

Today is the feast day of St. Thomas More, a man martyred not to political ambition — but to the honor of God.

“Be not afraid of your office.”

If more politicians honored that than ideology, ambition, ease, or position then this world would be a far better place. May the life and example of St. Thomas More continue to inspire those in public service, elected and otherwise.

Ever since I picked up Alexander Schuessler’s A Logic of Expressive Choice, I have been a rabid opponent of rational choice theory in favor of this alternative method — which for one reason or another, has yet to seriously pick up steam but has about a half dozen fascinating applications — most notable of which was the Obama ’08 campaign.

So to read this regarding the Hegelian view of rational choice, I could not help but be  just a tiny bit pleased:

Rational choice theory came under fire after the economic crisis of 2008, but remains central to economic analysis. Rational choice philosophy, by contrast, was always implausible. Hegel, for one, had denied all three of its central claims in his “Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences” over a century before. In that work, as elsewhere in his writings, nature is not neatly causal, but shot through with randomness. Because of this chaos, we cannot know the significance of what we have done until our community tells us; and ethical life correspondingly consists, not in pursuing wealth and power, but in integrating ourselves into the right kinds of community.

Critical views soon arrived in postwar America as well. By 1953, W. V. O. Quine was exposing the flaws in rational choice epistemology. John Rawls, somewhat later, took on its sham ethical neutrality, arguing that rationality in choice includes moral constraints. The neat causality of rational choice ontology, always at odds with quantum physics, was further jumbled by the environmental crisis, exposed by Rachel Carson’s 1962 book “The Silent Spring,” which revealed that the causal effects of human actions were much more complex, and so less predicable, than previously thought.

These efforts, however, have not so far confronted rational choice individualism as Hegel did: on its home ground, in philosophy itself. Quine’s “ontological relativity” means that at a sufficient level of generality, more than one theory fits the facts; we choose among the alternatives. Rawls’ social philosophy relies on a free choice among possible social structures. Even Richard Rorty, the most iconoclastic of recent American philosophers, phrased his proposals, as Robert Scharff has written, in the “self-confident, post-traditional language of choice.”

The inherent flaw — I believe — in rational choice theory isn’t in its attempt to rationalize decision making based on formula.  One’s decision to eat either an apple or an orange — or to steal or not steal — is not a fascinating concept.  What is fascinating is the human reaction to such a question.  “Why only an apple or an orange?” we ask, and in doing so, we begin to look for other answers to the choice presented… a lot of other answers.

Consider the all encompassing question “How should one live?” — a question that has puzzled mankind for thousands of years.  Austerely or luxuriously?  What is austere?  What is luxury?  Drive by a million homes, apartments, mansions, townhomes, and so forth and you’ll see that there is no clear answer to this question, though social planners and government bureaucrats would love to impose such definitions based on their particular, subjective ideal.  Once the question is raised, Pandora’s Box is open, and every possibility comes rushing forth.

Thus the problem with rational choice theory.  Given an infinite set (or a perceived infinite set) the human mind not only puts all sorts of hybrids and alternatives together, but the idea of rationality goes out the window.  Subjectivity in deciding the choice leads to subjectivity in what is considered “rational” by the actor — whether the decision is between an apple or an orange, or it is a variation of lifeboat ethics.

For philosophers, ethicists, policy makers, and others engaged in the public square, this is not an easy question to answer.  The best answers have simply released themselves of the responsibility of answering them — the free market, Burkean and Kirkean conservatism, and classical liberalism — while arranging the gullies and conduits in a general sense.

Still, these do not entirely satisfy… mankind constantly strives to make sense of his world.  We garden, build, plant, study, write, and organize to create that semblance of order.  Rational choice fails in the sense that it tries to rationalize all choice.  One cannot do this.  In the end, one finds themselves in a rearguard action, not explaining the rational but restricting choice — which finds instant rebellion in the hearts of many free will actors.

What we can do, however, is rationalize the ends and define the movement towards this end.  It is why political religions (i.e. ideologies) have sprung up and dominated the post-1789 landscape in the West.  This is not a rational decision by those actors participating in these movements, but one based in identity and emotion.

The trick is embracing the idea that one cannot know the outcome while directing events towards an end.

Allowing free actors to get there — or have a new leader establish a new end — is ultimately a function of the marketplace of ideas and the public square.  Rational choice theory simply does not suffice as either rational or a choice, but rather must be about limiting choices to fit into a subjective rationality not necessarily one’s own — and is therefore utterly insufficient.

IN FLANDERS FIELD

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

— John McCrae

For those with a more philosophical bend, the New York Times as re-started their philosophy column/blog entitled The Stone.  To kick things off, Justin E.H. Smith asks whether specialization to the exclusion of curiosity is really all that beneficial a trait in philosophers:

This is a project, I believe, that philosophers ought to recognize themselves as having in common with the other human sciences, and most of all with anthropology, as well as with newer disciplines such as cognitive science, which takes the substantial interconnection between philosophy and the study of the natural world as seriously as it was taken in the 17th century. The new “experimental philosophy” movement is also returning to an earlier conception of the inseparability of philosophical reflection and scientific inquiry, though curiously “x-phi” advocates describe themselves as breaking with “traditional” philosophy, rather than as returning to it, which is what in fact they are doing.

But for the most part philosophers prefer to keep their distance from the world, to do philosophy of this or that, and to disavow any interest in reckoning up the actual range of ways in which people, past or present, have explained the world. For some historians of philosophy, this makes things difficult, since we find we cannot live up to the expectation of our colleagues to show the immediate “philosophical” pay-off of our research, by which of course is meant the relevance to the set of issues that happen to interest them.

Read this all the way through.  Smith mentions Leibniz as an excellent example, but alas this is an instance where philosophers and scientists were considered one in the same.  Thomas Jefferson, perhaps, was the last in an instance of great minds where the hard sciences — physics, engineering, and chemistry — were still bound together by the penumbra of the classical tradition and its philosophical perspective on the natural world around us.

Interestingly enough, the kickoff post for The Stone by Simon Critchly touches on the topic that binds the hard sciences to what philosophers do and should try to foster, that being a responsibility to culture:

But philosophy is more than a profession. Philosophy is that living activity of critical reflection where we are invited to analyze the world in which we find ourselves, and to question what passes for common sense or opinion in the particular society in which we live.

This activity is not some optional addendum to a culture, but should form part of that culture’s life. It should be integral to how a culture converses with itself, understands itself, talks to other cultures and seeks to understand them. Philosophy can provide a method for debunking the many myths and ideologies that haunt the present, as well as proposing alternative frameworks for thinking about the concepts we live by.

Philosophy, one might say, is an essential ingredient in the enactment, enrichment and excitement of something like freedom. Through its relentless intellectual inquiry and argumentative rigor, philosophy can perhaps reach the parts of ourselves that other humanistic disciplines cannot reach.

Philosophy as the bedrock of culture?  Most certainly… and most assuredly if those who pursue the “queen of the sciences” keep in mind it’s many, many facets.