The problem with Bush’s idea of marriage

The New York Times reports that President Bush plans to allocate $1.5 billion dollars in a campaign drive to promote healthy marriage. In this instance, “healthy” strictly denotes a union between a man and woman. Far more ominous, however, is the talk circulating around whether the administration will go after a constitutional amendment codifying marriage in this way, an initiative for which Bush has evidenced vague if consistent support. This is a damaging idea for two reasons.

First, the historical durability of the Constitution is due in part to its overwhelming simplicity. Indeed, in parts it stands as the greatest achievement of American political theory, the one text that has truly bridged the gap between theory and practice—ever since, similar and invariably failed motives have been the ideological calling cards of aspiring intellectuals across the political spectrum. The Constitution was never intended to enshrine the shifting mores of generations, a palimpsest to be changed at the whim of an incoming president eager to make American democracy his own. But this is precisely what amending the constitution means in this case. There is clearly no urgency involved. In a pluralist liberal democracy, conservatives, religious groups, and sociologists are free to pursue the traditional ideals of the nuclear family to their hearts content. No one is stopping them. Conversely, the logic motivating an amendment, and indeed Bush’s proposed campaign strategy, attack this pluralism in a way that does require an urgent and strong response from Americans concerned with the basal rights and freedoms that accrue to citizens in the United States. By codifying the nature of state sanctioned unions, Bush is really proposing to place brutal and far-reaching constraints on individual choice. At the same time, he is promising to muddy the legal and political integrity of the Constitution.

Second, I cannot think of any reasonable argument that convinces us that the adoption of a particular form of the good life is contingent upon universal (or rather, societal) adoption of that form. In other words, Bush and his supporters are suggesting that agents can only realize the full utility of some practice X if and only if all other agents either follow suit and do X, or choose not to do X, given that all other X-like practices are unavailable. This is clearly an institutionalization of the good life. Though some political theorists of a perfectionist bent, notably Joseph Raz, argue that the state is responsible for promoting some versions of the good life and discouraging others, they almost never expound their ideas at this level of specificity. There is, say, a pretty good reason for the state to discourage a life whose main higher-order interests involves stealing from others in support of a drug habit. But that is probably as far as it goes. The idea is that such activities are harmful, no matter how you look at it.

Now conservatives are apt to suggest that any form of marriage that is not between a man and a woman is inherently harmful, and they can probably back this up with evidence selectively culled from empirical social science. But the spate of reports and anecdotes sprouting in the wake of the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision to allow gay marriage indicated that children raised by loving parents of the same sex were not placed at a disadvantage relative to peers raised in traditional familial environments. It is likely that concrete comparative studies of this phenomenon will emerge in the future that vindicate this allegation. Furthermore, no sane person can fail to recognize that the harm generated from actively curtailing civil liberties through the use of coercive legal and, I dare not imagine, constitutional force is incomparably greater than any residual harm incurred by children not raised in a manner consistent with the American form of totalitarian-socialist Christianity.

Lastly, it is worth noting that sweeping decisions of this sort promise to stymie social experimentation. In matters of great controversy, from Lochner to Roe vs. Wade, abortion and marriage, it seems best to let things play out in the public sphere, rather than opt for hasty and necessarily short-sighted preemption. For these reasons, the Bush administrations public scheming in the private life of the family deserves our closest attention.

Political Theory and Bioethics

Bioethics is big business, not just with academics looking for a niche market to practice their trade, but also for government-sponsored think tanks, the most prominent of which is the President’s Council on Bioethics, chaired by Leon Kass. With the promised ‘genetic revolution’ still waiting in the awnings, it is somewhat surprising that bioethics, an unremarkable field a decade ago, has gained such astonishing popularity. At base, the simple explanation for this phenomenon is that bioethical thinking has evolved as a sophisticated and more or less formalized expression of Luddite anxiety. Because genetic enhancements and their applications to human beings promise to alter the very nature of the self, bioethics has become a shield of natural, god-given integrity, even if many of its practitioners disavow an explicitly theological commitment. The question asked of any new genetic technology devolves to the impossibly abstract and uninformative query, “Is this technique good or bad, and will it promote this value in the future?”

I am not sure what can be learned from this type of inquiry, but it certainly eclipses the far more interesting and timely political questions that underlie the mass introduction of biotechnological capacities. Most obviously, genetic therapies that permit increases in height, intelligence, or longevity, will have to be paid for, either by the state or private individuals. The regime of justice expounded by political theorists, for one, will have to be expanded to cover instances in which the costs of genetic enhancements might be shouldered by the state to offset economic or social inequalities. In time, we’ll be speaking of genetic redistribution along with other forms of distributive justice. Similarly, we should be cognizant of how genetic changes alter the way in which citizens think of themselves as free and equal. For political theory, this is by far the most important consequence of the genomic age—liberalism, especially, is founded on the idea that persons enter a society through an unmediated birth. Thus, Rawls’s difference principle is intended to compensate those that hold a remedial share of natural and social talents. Its normative fruitfulness as an equalizer would be marred, if not incapacitated, if parents of differing status where able to affect the outcomes of social entry.

Professor Kass, in an interview published today, suggests that the real challenge of biotech has to do with the ability to transform human nature to such an extent that it might undermine the structure of our freedom. Hubris and caution, he says, should be the mainstays of ethical reflection in this instance. Otherwise, the danger seems to be that we will forget what it means to be a human being. But this is nothing new. Simply because the site of technological change will eventually shift to the human body, does not mean that the dynamics of this extensively studied process will follow suit. With the invention of the printing press, for example, our powers of communication and collective memory where forever altered, just as the introduction of mass transport has seemingly shrunk the planet to a ‘global village.’ These, and countless other technological innovations, have changed the nature of what it means to be human, though generally without the ethical fear that has accompanied biotech.

My point, simply, is that there is nothing particularly momentous, at least ethically speaking, about coming advances in the life sciences. What is relevant, however, is what these advances can and will mean for the conduct of every politics, and the normative descriptions of the political process furnished by theorists. In this light, the freedom and equality of the democratic citizen are suddenly subject to acute challenge—our theories will have to be revised.

For an excellent book on this topic, see Buchanan et al.

Time in the New Year

The arbitrary dawn of a new year inevitably jumpstarts our pursuit of manufactured promise, those dreams, resolutions, and vices that, with the studied fall of the minute hand, we are somehow empowered to realize, implement, and correct. The New Year, now two days old and aging at a constant rate, seems to be the most peculiar event regularly celebrated by human cultures, a saturnalia dedicated to time.

Brian Greene, in an evocative piece for the New York Times, outlines the cost of our adherence to a linear, Newtonian conception of time, and concludes that the price is measured in the reliability of our perceptions. Discussing the theory of general relativity, he points out that should we happen to hover in the near vicinity of a black hole for a year, upon our return to earth a million years would have elapsed. Similarly, persons separated by light years (billions, in this case) would be unable to agree, perceptually, on when a given event had occurred. Our clocks are only as good as the places we consult them from. Greene ends his fascinating and succinct route through relativity and quantum mechanics by suggesting that, though “the power of convention and experience” continues to hold sway over our daily lives, we all have a choice to make about perception, and what science tells us is beyond.

Reading his article reminded me of a passage in Paul Churchland’s small book Scientific Realism and the Plasticity of Mind. In that work, Churchland argues that if on a starry night we venture outdoors and tilt our heads while concentrating on some simple ideas about the mechanical behavior of planetary bodies in our solar system, we would begin to notice that the world is turning, and we are falling down its side. Churchland continues in this vein for some time, arguing that knowledge of basic science is potentially set to change the very baseline of our perceptual reality.

But all this is beside the point. It is not just that intuitive experience regularly and consistently trumps theoretical knowledge, that our notion of time is probably closer to Aristotle than to Newton, that our understanding of the mind is Plato’s, and so on. Instead, I think the more salient question is whether a scientized perceptual attitude could be in any way relevant for the coping of human beings? On a Kantian account of reality, for example, does knowledge of science augment our capacity for reasonable behavior? Given the incredibly small differences Greene admits obtain on Earth, would we do better to know that the principles of physics are constantly at work in an unseen background, contradicting the norms of our experience? And in a consequentialist world, would these same principles lead us to evaluate the outcomes of our actions differently? The answer is no. How could they?

American pragmatism, and the American spirit of commerce and practical coping, clearly disavows metaphysical speculation at the most propitious of times, never minding the slog of day-to-day existence. We are dependent animals, clever but limited, and the gems of physical wonder that Greene extends for our cognitive enjoyment are just that, a pastime for the idle. At their most nefarious, such thoughts can lead to the sort of confusion that undermines rather than enlightens. The idea underlying this is simply the familiar one that there is no use in doubting that which no sane person would deny (i.e. that I have a body, that there are other minds, etc).

In short, thinking of time as the new year begins its race towards itself, on to a never-ending (in our lifetimes) successions of thresholds that promise to annihilate the past in the resplendent crucible of an open future, it is perhaps better to think about how, in our ordinary experience, we manipulate time to aid self-deception. Jon Elster’s discussion of hyperbolic time discounting, for instance, strikes me as a far more relevant theme for reflection in these newborn weeks of January than the foundational tenets of 20th century physics. Not to mention, of course, the startlingly different conceptions of time held by other cultures. Among the Telefolmin, a Papau New Guinean people studied by the anthropologist Dan Jorgensen, time is conceived as a finite substance, subject to entropy, something that drains out of their society like water from a leaky dam. Thinking about the human conception of time, in its uncontrolled variety, will begin to tell us something about ourselves, and how we deal with the movement towards death (Heidegger’s Sein zum Tode) that inevitably approaches as we stave off the next moment only to embrace the one that follows.

Consistency and the environment

The Washington Post has a useful update of the Bush administration’s environmental efforts since the Kyoto Accords. Not surprisingly, the upshot is that Bush and his cronies have overwhelmingly tended to favor corporate or more generally economic interests over any attempt to foster true cooperation and enforcement over emissions standards. Mostly, this turns on a very peculiar and contradictory interpretation of the regulatory state.

On the one hand, Bush stole power on the standard platform of neo-liberal (or more appropriately libertarian) economics. That is, the United States was intended to strive for free, unregulated markets. The imposition of steel tariffs to protect powerful domestic metal industries was perhaps the most salient violation of this intention. But when it comes to the environment, the Post reports, Bush seems to rely on the public spirit of industry leaders to adopt emissions standards and regulate waste?

The question, of course, is why the Administration assumes that in one area people will be willing to voluntarily conform to standards that, if ignored, will cost them nothing, while in another, it is incumbent upon the state to step in to protect domestic interests. The answer is simply that it doesn’t.

Voluntary initiatives will not work, for the grounding reason that undermines libertarianism in general: self-interest is by itself not a generator of collective goods. Mancur Olson, in his justly famous work The Logic of Collective Action, suggested that communal goods could only be realized on the small scale, and as organizations grew, the probability of establishing truly cooperative arrangements would diminish. The state, the megalithic organization par excellence, has no reason to rely upon standards not backed by some form of coercive power.

Liberal theory urges citizens to act for a common and reasoned good, and supports an activist and affirmative state. And I think on liberal grounds, there may be some good arguments for protecting domestic industries, or at least caring for workers made redundant by changes in the global supply chain. However, this also means that in making decisions about the environment, we choose not to rely on the poorly imagined altruism of corporate heads who (rightly?) measure their success in terms of profit. Emissions standards, and environmental initiatives in general, are universally beneficial, and should by understood as an obligation incumbent on a democratic leadership that holds power in trusteeship for its citizens.

Compassionate conservatism is at root inconsistent. What is continually striking is that this realization, so easily arrived at, is rarely acted upon. Surely, the duty of Democratic Congressmen and women is to persist in pointing out this chasm between belief and action, the real world incarnation of the frequently lamented gulf between theory and practice. The point I am trying to make is simply that we demand consistency of our elected officials. Not only does this demand force politics to become more transparent and understandable to a normally uninterested public, but it also harkens a more sophisticated form of democratic governance, whose flaws and triumphs then become far more difficult to conceal.

The Practice of Justice in America In Hampton Roads,

The Practice of Justice in America In Hampton Roads, Virginia, killing a man over sour cream will get you a recommended jail sentence of 30 days. In Aroostook County, Maine, however, growing marijuana will lead to a two year jail sentence, of which 50 days will have to be served. This is justice.

Who’s Right?

Who’s Right? The Supreme Court decision in Lawrence and Garner v. Texas earlier this year seemed to offer hope to Americans and liberals around the world that Bush’s doctrine of “compassionate conservatism” still had a long way to go, at least legally speaking. Still, the idea that citizens still need to periodically come to the defense of basic liberties embedded in liberal democracy is more than a little bit absurd.

Yesterday, the compassionate conservatives and their more visible allies on the Christian right struck back, in a move predictably spearheaded by Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA). According to the New York Times, the Senate voted 64-to-34 in favor of a federal ban on intact dilation and extraction, a procedure otherwise known as partial-birth abortion. Should the bill become law, as it surely will when President Bush returns from his current tour of Asia, women undergoing the procedure, which typically occurs in the second or third trimesters, would be subject to a fine and incarceration for up to two years. In other words, a recognized medical procedure would gain the added status of a criminal act.

Santorum has said, “If your concern is women’s health, then you would be for banning this procedure.” On the other hand, if we are concerned with individual liberty, and have good faith in the autonomous capacity of citizens to decide what to do with their own bodies, then we should be adamantly against it. Abortion, like euthanasia and a host of other medical practices, is one in which the level of controversy is deeply tied to a certain conception of the person. For many theists, the moment of conception marks the beginning of autonomy, and hence the attribution of rights, while other groups regard the human status of fetuses and embryos incrementally. The point, of course, is not which view is correct, but whether any one view can be accepted by the public at large. And the bigger question, lest we forget, is to determine what value we place in our society on respecting the diverse and healthy pluralism that marks the Western conception of democracy. In my view, the bill as it stands does not, and can never do this.

Rwanda redux?

Rwanda redux? Samantha Power draws much needed attention to the current program of government sponsored ethnic cleansing now ongoing in Sudan in this New York Times Op-Ed. Since this week marks the ten year anniversary of the Hutu-led genocide of Rwandan Tutsis in 1994, the potential parallels are crucially important. Power writes:

On this anniversary, Western and United Nations leaders are expressing their remorse and pledging their resolve to prevent future humanitarian catastrophes. But as they do so, the Sudanese government is teaming up with Arab Muslim militias in a campaign of ethnic slaughter and deportation that has already left nearly a million Africans displaced and more than 30,000 dead. Again, the United States and its allies are bystanders to slaughter, seemingly no more prepared to prevent genocide than they were a decade ago.

The horrors in the Darfur region of Sudan are not "like" Rwanda, any more than those in Rwanda were "like" those ordered by Hitler. The Arab-dominated government in Khartoum has armed nomadic Arab herdsmen, or Janjaweed, against rival African tribes. The government is using aerial bombardment to strafe villages and terrorize civilians into flight. And it is denying humanitarian access to some 700,000 people who are trapped in Darfur.

Human Rights Watch has a detailed report of the crisis here (and a summary here).

It is banal to remark here that the fact that news of this has not made the international headlines is hardly surprising, given the far more important (sic) US presidential campaign and continuing American losses in Iraq. The United States under Bush seems less like a, in my opinion, welcome global policeman, and more like a homegrown vigilante with international reach. The world’s real trouble spots, most of Africa, Afghanistan, the Korean Peninsula, and much of South-East Asia, do not receive a fraction of the attention accorded to an anarchic black hole in the Middle East created by the present Administration. For more on this, read Power’s Pultizer Prize winning account of American non-response to genocide in the twentieth century.