My Beautiful ICE Bubble is Popped

That dour realist, Robert J. Samuelson, lost no time in exploding my lovely fantasy of speeding German ICE liners flashing over the rails between our cities. Well, I can always hope the folks at Siemens and Deutsche Bahn know something he doesn’t know.

But Wasn’t Hitler Evil?

Apologists for objective moral codes often seek to make their point by posing questions such as, “Wasn’t Hitler absolutely evil,” “Wasn’t Stalin absolutely evil?” or some variant thereof. The argument is emotional rather than rational, and relies on the manner in which our moral nature is wired in our brains to deny the dependence of morality on that wiring for its very existence. In other words, they rely on the fact that our brains cause us to perceive morality as an objective thing to argue that, therefore, it really is an objective thing.

Archeologist Timothy Taylor presents a variant of the “Wasn’t Hitler Evil?” argument in an essay entitled “The Trouble with Relativism,” that appeared in one of Edge.org’s latest publications, “What Have You Changed Your Mind About?” In this case, the “self-evident” evil he cites is the human sacrifice of children practiced by the Incas. According to Taylor,

In Cambridge at the end of the 1970s, I began to be inculcated with the idea that understanding the internal logic and value system of a past culture was the best way to do archaeology and anthropology… A ritual killing was not to be judged bad but considered valid within a different worldview… But what happens when relativism says that our concepts of right and wrong, good and evil, kindness and cruelty, are inherently inapplicable? Relativism self-consciously divests itself of a series of anthropocentric and anchronistic skins – modern, white, Western, male-focused, individualist, scientific (or “scientific”) – to say that the recognition of such value-concepts is radically unstable, the “objective” outsider opinion a worthless myth.

He then goes on to dismantle the historical myths that claimed “that being ritually killed to join the mountain gods was an honor that the Incan rulers accorded only to their own privileged offspring.” In fact, his research team discovered that they were actually “peasant children, who, a year before death, were given the outward trappings of high status and a much improved diet in order to make them acceptable offerings.”

Taking advantage of the moral high ground thus established, Taylor goes on,

We need relativism as an aid to understanding past cultural logic, but it does not free us from a duty to discriminate morally, and to understand that there are regularities in the negatives of human behavior as well as in its positives. In this case, it seeks to ignore what Victor Nell has described as “the historical and cross-cultural stability of the uses of cruelty for punishment, amusement, and social control.” By denying the basis for a consistent underlying algebra of positive and negative, yet consistently claiming the necessary rightness of the internal cultural conduct of “the Other,” relativism steps away from logic into incoherence.

Taylor is mistaken in equating recognition of the subjective nature of morality with “relativism.” I am familiar with the mentality of the people he describes, and I reject it as much as he does. He is quite right in pointing out the inconsistency of defending moral relativism while claiming at the same time that the internal cultural conduct of “the Other” is necessarily right. However, he also “steps from logic into incoherence” himself when he exploits the emotional impact of the murder of children for cynical ends to defend a “basis for a consistent underlying algebra of positive and negative.” If, in fact, those who would affirm the objective existence of morality have some logically defensible basis in mind then, as so eloquently suggested by E. O. Wilson in “Consilience,” they should “lay their cards on the table.” They have not been able to do that to date.

Morality is an evolved trait of human beings. We perceive good and evil as absolutes because that is our nature. That is the way we are programmed to perceive them. In reality, they are subjective mental constructs. No moral revulsion or emotional response, no matter how strong, not even to Hitler’s Holocaust, or Stalin’s mass slaughter, or the ritual murder of children, can convert morality from what it really is into that which we perceive it to be.

Israel, Sweden, and the Modern Face of Anti-Semitism

If events in Sweden are any guide, European anti-Semitism is in the process of reverting from the coded “anti-Israel” version to the full blown “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” version that prevailed in the days before the Third Reich. The “anti-Israel” form of anti-Semitism has been the prevailing flavor on the left for some time. For example, one can usually find artifacts of it in the form of a grotesque double standard on any given day at the BBC’s “news” site. Now, at least one Swedish tabloid has decided to dispense with the mask and promote the “blood libel” version in unvarnished form.

It has been the unfortunate fate of the Jewish people to fit perfectly into the role of an “out-group” for many centuries (see my post on the Amity-Enmity Complex). Obviously, things haven’t changed. Hatred of the Jews, hidden beneath a thin veneer of “anti-Zionist” camouflage for the sake of political correctness, has been a defining characteristic of the ideological left for some time. An interesting expression of this phenomenon has been the wholesale adoption of leftist “anti-imperialist/anti-colonialist” rhetoric by right wing Islamists.

The lesson here is the same one that history has been beating our heads with for millenia, but that we still stubbornly refuse to learn. It is that the spinners of ideological utopias and the authors of the latest “modern morality” will, inevitably, fail as long as they continue to ignore the facts of human nature. Those facts aren’t going to change any time soon. In the meantime, we must understand and accommodate them. Human beings must have out-groups. They must hate. These things are as much a part of their nature as the “good” aspects of their behavior. Our predisposition to hate and despise an “out-group” must and will have an outlet. One can easily confirm this by visiting any political blog or forum on the ideological right or left and reading the comments posted there. Unless we finally accommodate ourselves to what we really are, we will continue to stumble from one holocaust to another, even as we chase after the latest chimerical ideals. Let us finally accept the fact that we must hate, understand the roots of that hate in our nature as a species, and try to find outlets for it that are not self-destructive. If we fail, self-destruction may well be our fate.

The “Pravda” of Nicholas I

Today’s lead article on the website of “Pravda” is entitled, “The Modern West, A Culture of Death.” Were a modern day Russian Rip van Winkle to read it after a catnap of 20 years, he would probably conclude it was just another one of his crazy dreams and go back to sleep. Here’s the lead paragraph.

From the early 1800s, the West, in an affront to God, has moved ever more rapidly into a culture of death and destruction, away from the teachings of Christ. At its present state, the most significant thing that the West is bringing to humanity is a culture of totalitarianism and death, one on such a nuanced level as would only be celebrated by the most brutal of Pagans and Lucifirians and would even be an affront to the most blood thirsty of the Islamic radicals.

Great shades of the Black Hundreds! Czar Nicholas I has come back to reclaim his own! The article comes complete with a picture of two “babushkas” seated at a McDonald’s to set the proper ideological tone, and is written in a style commensurate with Pravda’s current “National Enquirer” look. I am anything but an expert on the prevailing political nuances in the Russian media, but, if Pravda is any guide, the country has completed its Marxist somersault, and has now landed with both feet firmly in the past. Consider this remarkable line from a paragraph about the conduct of war by Orthodox soldiers:

Do not confuse this with the actions of the Red Army, in WW2, which was under the control of the Western Marxist import and its subsequent ideology of death.

One finds it somehow surprising that such a stunning volte face took place in Russia, and not China. There, in spite of the cultural pride expressed in the paradigm of the “Middle Kingdom” surrounded by unenlightened barbarians enshrined in the countries very name, the “Western Marxist import” still prevails. Indeed, the ruling oligarchy depends on it to establish the legitimacy of its rule.

Russia, on the other hand, seems to have completely shaken off alien ideologies and taken a Great Leap Backwards, if Pravda is any guide. The tone of the article would certainly have been familiar to the Marquis de Custine, who traveled through Russia in 1839 in the days of Nicholas I. Indeed, there is much in his description of the country that seems to transcend the ideological changes of later years, and would have sounded as prescient under Stalin as it did under Nicholas. For example,

In Russia, the government rules everything and vitalizes nothing. The inhabitants of this vast Empire, though not calm, are dumb. Death hovers over every head and strikes at random — it is enough to make one doubt divine justice. Mankind there has two coffins: the cradle and the tomb. Mothers must weep for their children at birth as much as at death.

and,

The people and its ruler are in harmony here. The Russians make themselves witnesses, accomplices and victims in these prodigies of willpower and would not repudiate them even to resurrect all the slaves whose lives are forfeited as a result. However, what surprises me is not that one man, nourished on the idolatry of his own person, a man described as all-powerful by sixty million humans (or near-humans) whould undertake such things and carry them through. What does surprise me is that among all the voices testifying to the glory of this single man, not one rises above the chorus to speak for humanity against the miracles of autocracy. You can say of the Russians, both great and small, that they are intoxicated with slavery.

Custine’s account of his travels is well worth the modern reader’s time. One hopes for the sake of Russia’s people that his words will not be as prophetic for her future as they have been for her past.

German Trains for US Cities?

According to Der Spiegel, Siemens and Deutsche Bahn (German Rail) want to build a network of high speed trains in the US modeled after Germany’s Intercity Express (ICE) system. I’ll “hold my thumbs” for them (German for keep my fingers crossed.) The ICE trains are a fantastic way to travel, especially if they came complete with the civilized dining cars they have in Germany. According to Spiegel,

Both companies want to get into the US train business ‘in a big way.’… According to Spiegel’s information, the basic idea is to cooperate in building the high speed rail lines that are planned in conjunction with the US government’s stimulus package. Both Siemens and Deutsche Bahn consider it an interesting market… The US Administration wants to build high speed lines between San Francisco and Los Angeles as well as Miami and Orlando, among other places. Within the German consortium, Siemens would be responsible for providing the technology, such as ICE-3 high speed trains, as well as the necessary infrastructure… Deutsche Bahn would then operate the lines. The company’s internal consulting firm, DB International, is already working on the project.

I hope they can make it work. Their main challenge will be to keep the costs down. Given the increasingly painful hassles at airports, travel in a sardine can at 35,000 feet couldn’t compete with rail on some heavily traveled routes if fares were even remotely comparable. Take the Acela route between Washington and New York, for example. You step into a comfortable train with plenty of leg room at DC’s Union Station, and two hours and 45 minutes later you step out at Penn Station, right in the middle of Manhattan. It makes sense for business travelers, because you can easily go up and and back on the same day.

On the Reality of Moral Absolutes

Nothing I post here should be construed to imply that it is not absolutely and objectively true, independently of any subjective moral construct, that the Minnesota Vikings are an evil football team. No fuzziness of thinking need be tolerated in the case of such self-evident truths.

John Stuart Mill and Utilitarianism: The Quest for a Moral Law

Like many others before him, John Stuart Mill sought the summum bonum, the holy grail of the foundation of morality. For him, it was Utility, or “The Greatest Happiness Principle.” What he meant by Utility is neither here nor there as far as this post is concerned. Those interested may find his essay online at Project Gutenberg. The fact that he posed such a solution to the age old riddle of the fundamental law of morality is what interests us here. It demonstrates that he, too, was chasing the chimera of morality as an object. He came close but could not quite free himself of the illusion of morality as a thing-in-itself. In fact, he was well aware of the distinction between subjective and objective morality. We see this, for example, in the following passage:

There is, I am aware, a disposition to believe that a person who sees in moral obligation a transcendental fact, an objective reality belonging to the province of “Things in themselves”, is likely to be more obedient to it than one who believes it to be entirely subjective, having its seat in human consciousness only.

Mill would certainly have objected to the claim that he was a “transcendentalist.” Again, quoting from the essay,

Therefore, if the belief in the transcendental origin of moral obligation gives any additional efficacy to the internal sanction, it appears to me that the utilitarian principle has already the benefit of it. On the other hand, if, as is my own belief, the moral feelings are not innate, but acquired, they are not for that reason the less natural.

In spite of this, one constantly runs into artifacts of the implicit assumption that morality corresponds to an object, a real thing. Consider, for example, the following excerpt concerning the basis of right and wrong:

A test of right and wrong must be the means, one would think, of ascertaining what is right or wrong, and not a consequence of having already ascertained it.
The difficulty is not avoided by having recourse to the popular theory of a natural faculty, a sense of instinct, informing us of right and wrong. For – besides that the existence of such a moral instinct is itself one of the matters in dispute – those believers in it who have any pretensions to philosophy, have been obliged to abandon the idea that it discerns what is right or wrong in the particular case in hand, as our other senses discern the sight or sound actually present. Our moral faculty, according to those of its interpreters who are entitled to the name of thinkers, supplies us only with the general principles of moral judgments; it is a branch of our reason, not of our sensitive faculty; and must be looked to for the abstract doctrines of morality, not the perception of it in the concrete.

The implicit assumption here is that there really is something concrete to find. As I have pointed out in my three posts on the Question of Should, that is the fundamental fallacy of all the “transcendental” moralists, the believers in an independent moral law existing of itself. Mill does not include himself among their number, yet he evidently perceives morality in the same way. He explicitly rejected the notion of morality as a real object, yet his entire essay may be understood as an attempt to establish the claim of Utility to serve as a basis for a morality that may not actually be, but would still be perceived as, a real thing.

Still, as can be seen in the excerpt above, he was groping about, tantalizingly close to the answer. He was aware of the notion of what he called a “moral instinct.” However, he could not quite win through to the realization that the “moral instinct” was itself fundamental.

It is interesting to speculate on the impact Darwinian thought might have had on Mill’s theory of morality had he lived 20 or 30 years later. By that time, a thinker as brilliant as he would have had a much more sophisticated appreciation of the concept of morality as an evolved trait. As it was, he realized he was but the most recent of a long line of thinkers who had, so far, all fallen short in their search for the holy grail. As he put it,

And after more than two thousand years the same discussions continue, philosophers are still ranged under the same contending banners, and neither thinkers nor mankind at large seem nearer to being unanimous on the subject, than when the youth Socrates listened to the old Protagoras, and asserted (if Plato’s dialogue be grounded on a real conversation) the theory of utilitarianism against the popular morality of the so-called sophist.

Conceding all these efforts have been in vain, he says,

To inquire how far the bad effects of this deficiency have been mitigated in practice, or to what extent the moral beliefs of mankind have been vitiated or made uncertain by the absence of any distinct recognition of an ultimate standard, would imply a complete survey and criticism of past and present ethical doctrine. It would, however, be easy to show that whatever steadiness or consistency these moral beliefs have attained, has been mainly due to the tacit influence of a standard not recognized.

The shot flew close to the mark. It is not hard to imagine that, had he read Darwin’s “The Descent of Man,” and “The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals,” not to mention the works of Huxley and Spencer, the truth about the “standard not recognized” would have dawned on him.

Mill had much else to say of relevance to our modern political predicament. We will take this up in the context of another of his famous essays, “On Liberty,” in a later post.

John Stuart Mill

Nixon and Palin

If you’re dubious about my “revisionist history” version of Watergate, just keep your eyes open. The legacy media’s modus operandi hasn’t changed. The only thing that changes is the identity of their hate object du jour. Then it was Nixon. Today it’s Palin. Notice the venom with which they keep beating on her, even though she’s out of office, because, against all odds, they still consider her a threat. When you see a story about her in the MSM, ask yourself, “Is this positive or negative coverage?” Now imagine all the hatred and malice they’ve directed at her ramped up about an order of magnitude and directed at a sitting President. That was Watergate. To grasp the reality of it, all you have to do is go back and read the newspapers.

In Case You Needed a Reason to Go Back to Germany…

Hat tip Moe Lane.

Medical Malpractice Lawsuits and Health Care Costs

We are now in the midst of a great national debate over the nationalization of health care. It would be more useful to nationalize the legal profession, for we are fast becoming what the great political theorist Milovan Djilas called a “Land without Justice.” Like the proverbial frog in boiling water, we tolerate the gross injustices we must endure on a daily basis because they have become normal. The legal system didn’t collapse overnight. It became rotten in small increments. We just got used to it. It now amounts to an officially sanctioned, pervasive, and massive system of bribery under which economic existence requires payoffs to legions of lawyers whose “services” to the country are more or less on a par with those of common burglars.

Consider what happens when someone sues their neighbor in this country. Regardless of whether the defendant is innocent or guilty, it will be necessary for him to bear potentially crippling legal fees, not to mention a psychological burden of insecurity that will last for years as the litigation proceeds through the courts. Can anyone explain to me how it is “just” that thousands upon thousands of innocent people must suffer such punishment in our country every year? If we are to avoid this punishment, we are required to pay substantial bribes to the lawyers in the form of high premiums for health, car, and legal insurance. The situation has become intolerable. If we must have big government, let us start by nationalizing the legal industry.

Let us consider how this works out in the case of health care costs. The lawyers tell us that the cost of medical malpractice insurance is insignificant, amounting to less than 2% of total health care costs. According to a recent Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report they often cite, that is quite true. It is also irrelevant. One can see that by looking at a pie chart (hattip Health Guide USA, see below) of our total health care costs. Those costs include a great number of things, such as research, structures and equipment, home health care, hospital care, etc., which figure either relatively little or not at all in the overall medical litigation picture. In fact, such litigation is concentrated overwhelmingly in the “physicians and clinical services” portion of the pie chart, and to only a fraction of that. It is cold comfort to the many physicians who must pay exorbitant malpractice insurance premiums, amounting to many tens, and, in some cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, that those premiums only amount to 2% of the nation’s total health care costs of about $2.5 trillion. For them, the burden is a lot more than 2% of their income. The argument is about as logical as a burglar attempting to justify his acts because, after all, the total take of thieves in the U.S. is less than 2% of the total military budget.

In return for this extortion, the lawyers explain to us that we all profit by improved health care. In fact, according to the CBO report they so often cite themselves,

Defenders of current tort law sometimes argue that restrictions on malpractice liability could undermine the deterrent effect of such liability and thus lead to higher rates of medical injuries. However, it is not obvious that the current tort system provides effective incentives to control such injuries. One reason for doubt is that health care providers are generally not exposed to the financial cost of their own malpractice risk because they carry liability insurance, and the premiums for that insurance do not reflect the records or practice styles of individual providers but more-general factors such as location and medical specialty. Second, evidence suggests that very few medical injuries ever become the subject of a tort claim. The 1984 New York study estimated that 27,179 cases of medical negligence occurred in hospitals throughout the state that year, but only 415—or 1.5 percent—led to claims. In short, the evidence available to date does not make a strong case that restricting malpractice liability would have a significant effect, either positive or negative, on economic efficiency.

In a word, the only ones who gain anything from the suffering and expense that health litigation entails are the lawyers themselves. They gain big time, and that’s the only reason our organized system of bribery continues. This is true not only of health care, but of accident litigation and any other activity in which lawyers can exploit human greed to inflict their “services” on the rest of us.

Suppose, however, that the effects of all this costly litigation are really all the lawyers tell us they are. Suppose it really does weed out bad doctors. Suppose it really does improve health care. Suppose it really does compensate the victims of malpractice, and only them, for the injury they have suffered. Would that, somehow, justify punishing the innocent with the guilty, forcing them to bear high legal fees, years of anxiety, and days wasted in litigation? Was that the dream of our founding fathers? “Let 100 innocent suffer as long as we can catch one who is really guilty?” That was the ethic of the Gulag. It seems to me that only those who have been profoundly corrupted by greed can really believe such a thing. And yet that is the kind of system we have, not only in medical malpractice, but in all other tort litigation. Odd, isn’t it, that all the worthy “experts” in ethics our universities have been pumping out never seem to object to this travesty of justice, or at least not loudly enough to make themselves heard?

The private practice of law in the United States has been corrupted beyond repair. The government has nationalized large sectors of the financial and automobile industries, and is in the process of nationalizing health care. While they’re at it, they should do something really useful, and nationalize the legal profession.