Richard Posner on the deterioration of the conservative movement

Posted on May 12, 2009 by David Hume

Out of curiosity, what do readers think about Richard Posner’s Is the Conservative Movement Losing Steam? I am personally sympathetic to Posner-style technocrats, but lack a “long view” that older individuals might have in regards to the evolution of American conservatism’s style over the past two generations.

Posted in law, politics | Tagged | 119 Comments

Politics as personal disposition

Posted on May 7, 2009 by David Hume

Will Wilkinson has a post up, The Caveman Roots of Liberal Democracy?, which riffed off some opinions in regards to the swing back toward “primal” values which I perceive to be the norm in modern liberal societies. Some of the comments on Will’s post objected to my contention that political orientation is heritable. First, I do not believe that liberalism or conservatism, as we understand it today in the United States, was selected for in the past. Rather, there are personality traits which seem to predispose one to being inclined toward liberal or conservative politics. For example, there is a strong correlation between “Openness to experience” and political liberalism. Depending on the personality traits in question one can expect heritabilities in the range of 0.2 to 0.8, with a rough working rule of thumb of 0.5. By heritability I simply refer to the amount of variation in the population that can be attributed to variation in genes.

So when I suggest that someone has different likelihoods of being liberal, I do not mean in any absolute sense where liberalism and conservatism are fixed. Rather, I mean in terms of disposition so that a liberal is one who is more open to change and disruption of established norms and values. In the 3rd century Europeans who converted to Christianity away from the pagan customs of their kith and kith would probably have a different personality profile than those who remained pagan. Today I suspect that Europeans who leave the Christian religion have a similar personality profile to those 3rd century Christians, as what is “new” and “novel” has changed. Conservative and liberal dispositions exist against a contemporary population reference.

Also, there was some objection to the idea of liberal and conservative insofar as are historically embedded terms. That is, the Left and Right only making sense after the French Revolution. I think at the end of the day this is semantics, and I am willing to substitute a new word for “liberal” and “conservative” dispositions if that will satisfy political philosophy nerds. Classicists are wont to note that identifying the Populares with the Left and the Optimates with the Right is bound to confuse more than clarify, as ancient polities did not have the same concerns and tensions as modern ones. Fair enough, but I think one can see a dispositional difference insofar as the Optimates were ostensibly defending proximate injustice with the ultimate aim of preserving the customs & traditions of the Republic which had within them embedded latent functions.

Finally on my point that history does not always move in one direction, it seems to me that collapse of the idea of absolute monarchy in the 18th century was simply a reversion to the more consensual politics dominant in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire. Barbarian northern Europe had for example a strong tradition of elective monarchy, and the power of local magnates in the face of almost ceremonial monarchs is well known. The English Civil War, or the chaos around the Fronde can be seen as conflicts which pitted the conservative decentralists against the forward thinking absolutists (by 1700 these two conflicts had set the stage for a radically different status quos which shaped the character of political discourse in France and England during the Enlightenment). Of course the terminology can confuse, and a thick knowledge of local historical conditions are necessary to understand in which direction history was moving.

Posted in culture, politics, science | Tagged , , | 21 Comments

Regional differences in attitudes toward gay marriage

Posted on May 5, 2009 by David Hume

It looks like both Maine & New Hampshire will be taking steps toward recognizing gay marriage. If that happens only Rhode Island in New England will not recognize gay marriage. It also looks like there will be movement in New York. Clearly there’s a regional bias here; but I thought it would be nice to quantify it. The GSS has the “MARHOMO” variable for 1988, 2004, 2006 and 2008. I limited it to 2006 and 2008 as attitudes didn’t differ between these years, and split it by the Census regions. Results below.

gssregion1

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Mary avoids consubstantiation with a tortilla

Posted on May 4, 2009 by Heather Mac Donald

The Virgin Mary has been spotted in a California restaurant griddle, which has since been retired from use and turned into a shrine.  No word yet from the Church about the authenticity of the sighting, though a local associate pastor confirms: “If God wants to do something like this, he can do it.”

Such is the stuff of modern miracles.  No more walking on water or raising the dead.  Or snuffing out swine flu.

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Gay marriage and unintended consequences

Posted on May 4, 2009 by Heather Mac Donald

The biggest social problem in the U.S. today is the crime and academic achievement gap between blacks and whites. The academic achievement gap (several grade levels and 200 SAT points (old system)) distorts our pedagogy, academic hiring and admissions, and employment standards in the public and private sectors (see the recent New Haven firefighters reverse discrimination case); it triggers huge and to date wholly ineffective government programs to try to close the gap (e.g., Head Start, No Child Left Behind). Black males commit homicide at ten times the rate of white males; in New York City, a representative locality, any violent crime is 13 times more likely to be committed by a black perp than by a white one. This crime gap results in depressed urban economies, huge incarceration costs, and the unjust demonization of the police as racist for merely going after criminals and of inner-city employers who worry about black thieves coming into their stores.

One overpowering cause of black social failure is the breakdown of marriage in the black community. Nationally, the black illegitimacy rate is 71%; in some inner city areas, it is closer to 90%. When boys grow up without any expectation that they will have to marry the mother of their children, they fail to learn the most basic lesson of personal responsibility. A community without the marriage norm is teetering on the edge of civilizational collapse, if it has not already fallen into the abyss. Fatherless black boys, who themselves experience no pressure to become marriageable mates as they grow up, end up joining gangs, dropping out of school, and embracing a “street” lifestyle in the absence of any male authority in the home.

If the black illegitimacy rate were not nearly three times the rate of whites’, I would have few qualms about gay marriage. Or if someone can guarantee that widespread gay marriage would not further erode the expectation among blacks that marriage is the proper context for raising children, I would also not worry. But no one can make that guarantee. Continue reading →

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Back to the Paleolithic

Posted on May 4, 2009 by Bradlaugh

Thanks to Mr. Stuttaford & Mr. Hume for their responses. A few points at random.

•  (1) Is conservatism coextensive with libertarianism? You’d think so from reading the exchanges here. However, it seems to me there ought to be political room somewhere for good old instinctual hostility to unnecessary change, even if that change increases individual freedom of action. Why change something that works reasonably well — as well as anything does in human affairs? How do you know what the consequences will be? That there is some injustice going on, some wrong to be righted, that was first noticed in 1997, having escaped the attention of absolutely everybody for the previous 10,000 years, seems to me implausible and frivolous. Conservatism is made up of attitudes like mine. Well, I thought it was.

•  (2) The discussions here have all been very smart-centric. That’s why they have such a libertarian flavor. It’s not the case that you can’t be a conservative without being a supernaturalist; but I’m beginning to suspect that the number of us who are (a) conservative in temperament, and (b) in the top IQ quartile, yet (c) neither supernaturalist nor libertarian, may be vanishingly small. Perhaps I should start a new blog for Secular Non-Libertarian Smart Conservatives.  If there are any others. 

Still, arguments that take no account of the left-hand side of the bell curve — which is to say, most of the arguments on these comment threads — are missing some important point. Ordinary unintellectual people depend, much more than do grad-school types, on stable and customary social institutions. Disturb social equilibriums at your peril.

•  However: (3) The notion expressed here by Mr. Hume — though as he’s made clear, it didn’t originate with him alone — that we are going through some great collective psycho-social shift which includes a return to some paleolithic values, is persuasive to me. (In fact I’ve written about it here.) This change seems to be happening extraordinarily fast, as Ice Ages are supposed (by some theorists) to come and go in just a few decades. Sell marriage, monotheism, capitalism, patriarchy, sumptuary codes, and law. Buy pleasure-bonding, unstructured spirituality, “primitive communism” (K. Marx), sexual egalitarianism, transient fads, and “empathy” (B. Obama).

Looking at the first derivatives here, I’d say Andrew is probably right that there is no stopping this train. Nothing is ever utterly inevitable, though, and for all anyone knows we might be proscribing homosexual behavior again in 50 years. Or we might have cured it — the Cochran/Ewald pathogenic theory of homosexuality has never been refuted, so far as I know. (Of course, homosexuals don’t believe they have a disease; but then, as Greg Cochran has pointed out somewhere, neither do schizophrenics.)

Ooops, I’ve set off all the political correctness alarms …  Bad, bad me!

• (4) I see that Sweden has just become the 7th nation to legalize homosexual marriage. (The list includes, surprisingly, South Africa.) I wonder what Charles XII would have said? (IIRC his sexual orientation has been much debated.)

• (5) The modal attitudes to homosexuality down through the ages have been that male homosexuality is to some degree disgusting (the degree I think being milder among ordinary people than in law), while female homosexuality is comical.  To judge from common talk, jokes, sitcoms, and the like, these attitudes are still very persistent.  Do pro-SSM people think they will disappear?  Go underground? Or what?

Posted in culture, politics, Uncategorized | 51 Comments

Change does not always march in one direction

Posted on May 4, 2009 by David Hume

Over the past few days we have had some discussion on this weblog about the marriage of individuals of the same sex from different vantage points. As an empirical matter I think Andrew Stuttaford is correct to predict that this is one argument that the social conservatives are going to lose in our time. I also lean in Andrew’s direction when it comes to accepting this change. This is not to say that I think that homosexual marriage is wrong and I am accepting it as a point of pure pragmatism. In fact, there are all sorts of things which I find inevitable, from my own death proximately, to the futility of baryonic based life ultimately, that I am not positively inclined toward & wish to postpone as long as possible. This is why I understand why social conservatives may oppose this change, even if they also agree that it is an inevitable development, for they oppose it as a matter of principle and not pragmatic utility, and postponing what they consider to be wrong is naturally a mitzvah in their eyes.

But a dispositional conservatism serves more than a periodoc brake upon the inevitable march of history toward its final Utopian state.  In fact the empirical record shows some cyclical dynamics in human morals and values. After all, Western liberal democracy is a throwback in many ways to the individualism of the hunter-gatherer phase of human history. I believe that the institutions and norms of communitarian “traditional” cultures were in fact ad hoc kluges which attempted to reconcile our “caveman psychology” with post-Neolithic mass society. Conservative and liberal dispositions seem to be partly hardwired; as humans we place ourselves along the spectrum. It is not simply a matter of conservatives always being a few generations behind liberals along the inevitable secular ascent up toward earthly paradise. Rather it seems possible these different political tribes are like two cylinders which serve as the motive force behind a winding and unpredictable journey.

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The Gay Marriage Thing

Posted on May 3, 2009 by Andrew Stuttaford

Goodness, John, talk about jumping into a minefield…

Anyway, FWIW, here are my two cents. To start with, it’s worth saying that if anyone had asked me for my views on gay marriage a decade or so ago, I would have been astonished. The idea had never really occurred to me. The debates of recent years have changed all that, however. Having thought it through, it’s difficult to think that the utilitarian objections to same sex unions stack up too well.

There are, of course, those who have deeply-felt moral objections to gay marriage and there are others who make a moral case for changing the law to allow it. I don’t share the former and I’m not completely persuaded by the latter, but as my general view is that morality ought, where feasible, to be a matter for individuals rather than the state, I’ll leave those controversies to others, pausing only to observe that changes in the law that bring a little happiness, resolve some painful practical injustices (from hospital visitation rights to the ability to benefit from the spousal Death Tax exemption) and help take the previously marginalized deeper into ‘regular’ society should, probably, be seen as a Good Thing.

The role of the Right should be to shape the way that this change takes place, by building in, for example, free speech and ‘conscientious objection’ protections to those who do not go along. If that’s the aim, a position of outright opposition is not the best place to begin,

The strongest potential argument against changing the law (other than the generally sound principle that there should be a presumption against tinkering with society’s more important institutions) is that it will fundamentally change the nature of marriage, an institution that, for all its flaws, undoubtedly plays a useful part in holding society together. But does that argument hold up? Theoretically, and for very obvious reasons, same sex unions represent an enormous change, even to a robust, flexible institution that has over the centuries been governed by a bewildering range of frequently inconsistent rules, but the magic word is ‘theoretically’.

Homosexuals make up a small percentage of the population and what evidence there is would suggest that only a  small percentage of that small percentage has any interest in getting married (for the most part, I suspect that they’d just like to know that they could if they wanted to). Under the circumstances the idea that giving this tiny minority the right to marry would have any impact on the behavior of the remaining 96 percent (pick a number) of the population is highly unlikely. If anything, it might actually reinforce the idea of marriage as a desirable goal.

There’s also something else to consider. Much as some might think that the grubby business of politics shouldn’t intrude into a debate like this, it does and it will. Like it or not, this issue is a political marker of far greater weight than its practical consequences (at least as I see them) would merit. Back in the day, the GOP’s leadership understood this and used it, rightly, wrongly but undeniably successfully, to the Republicans’ political advantage. The signs are that the mathematics behind that calculation is going into reverse and that the GOP’s position on this issue is, increasingly, costing it support, particularly among the younger voters who will be essential if there is to be any hope of bringing an end to the current Democratic ascendancy. For those conservatives who see opposition to gay marriage as a vital matter of principle that may not matter, but for anybody else on the right to take a stance that may help prolong Democratic misgovernment looks like an awfully high price to pay merely to stop two men or two women walking down the aisle together.

Posted in Uncategorized | 45 Comments

The Search for Transcendence, or Whatever

Posted on May 2, 2009 by Andrew Stuttaford

The New York Times is running a piece today by Charles Blow in which he asks why so many of the children of the “religiously unaffiliated” turn to religion. It’s a mildly interesting question, but the answer is straightforward: the religious impulse is innate. It’s the way our species has evolved. Blow gets this, I think, but I was interested to read that his “non-religious friends” apparently still believe that most people are only religious because of the way they were raised. Oh dear. If that’s indeed what they think, that says something about the left-liberal pieties of the circles in which Mr. Blow moves (I’m guessing about this, but he is a writer for the Times) and their continuing faith in the perfectibility of man, but not much else.

Belief in a deity (or deities), and the desire to worship it or them, is an almost universal aspect of human nature. This not something that can be wished or indoctrinated away, and it’s pointless and maybe even destructive to try. It’s far better, surely, to channel that impulse by giving children some sort of gentle religious grounding, preferably in a well-established, undemanding, culturally useful (understanding all that art and so on) and mildly (small c) conservative denomination that doesn’t dwell too much on the supernatural and keeps both ritual and philosophical speculation in their proper place. Better the vicar than Wicca, say I.

Mr. Blow goes on to write

While science, logic and reason are on the side of the nonreligious, the cold, hard facts are just so cold and hard. Yes, the evidence for evolution is irrefutable. Yes, there is a plethora of Biblical contradictions. Yes, there is mounting evidence from neuroscientists that suggests that God may be a product of the mind. Yes, yes, yes. But when is the choir going to sing? And when is the picnic? And is my child going to get a part in the holiday play?

Fair enough, but then we get this:

“As the nonreligious movement picks up steam, it needs do a better job of appealing to the ethereal part of our human exceptionalism.”

Oh please. Spare us that. That way lies madness, boredom, ritualistic replacements for ritual, cults of Reason, readings from Dawkins and endless, achingly tedious hours of discussion about the meaning of life, the evils of religion and all the rest of it. And while you’re at it, spare us a ‘movement’ based on disproving this, refuting that, and getting all bent out of shape by trivia such as the reference to God on the currency.

Mr. Blow claims:

We are more than cells, synapses and sex drives. We are amazing, mysterious creatures forever in search of something greater than ourselves.

Speak for yourself, Mr. Blow. I’m just looking for a nice life.

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Pakistan is already an Islamic State

Posted on April 30, 2009 by David Hume

So claims Ali Eteraz:

Most people in the world, including some Pakistanis, live under the illusion that the country is secular and just happens to have been overrun by extremists. This is false. Pakistan became an Islamic state in 1973 when the new constitution made Islam the state religion. Under the earlier 1956 constitution Islam had been merely the “official” religion. Nineteen-seventy-three, in other words, represents Pakistan’s “Iran moment“—when the government made itself beholden to religious law. Most western observers missed the radical change because the leader of Pakistan at the time was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, a whiskey-drinking, pseudo-socialist from a Westernized family. Those that did notice the transformation ignored it because the country was reeling from a massive military defeat in 1971, which led to half the nation becoming Bangladesh.

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