The "Business" of Government, Part One

            One of the biggest themes of the Republican campaign in this election is Mitt Romney’s alleged business acumen.  Of course, some debate his track record, and others the relevance of business skills to the presidency.  Be that as it may, I’ve been thinking about Republicans, Democrats, and business wisdom, and in the next blogs I’ll apply some of the tenets of the past decade’s biggest business book, Jim Collins’s Good to Great to the two parties. GtoG seems particularly apt, since going from good (or bad) to great is what every presidential candidate promises he’ll do for America.

            For the unfamiliar, Collins’s Good to Great followed a number of businesses that had made a leap from average to dominant in their fields, paired with similar companies that had not leapt forward, (e.g. Walgreens vs. Eckerd, Circuit City vs. Silo).  His research team found certain characteristics that they believe consistently distinguished such companies. 

            The first of these I’ll consider is “First Who…Then What.”  The idea is that great companies put together the right team of people and only then decide new directions for the company.  The popular phase that captures this theme is “getting the right people on the bus.”  So I decided to choose one particular seat on the bus –the relief driver, so to speak – the Vice Presidents and VP candidates of the two major parties.

            In my lifetime (which I’ll stretch to include prenatal life, to be fair to Republicans), the two parties have put forth 25 candidates for the position (besides those three who have stepped up after deaths or resignations): 11 Republicans and 14 Democrats.   Here they are:

Republican VPs                                                Democratic VPs

Richard Nixon                                                Harry Truman

Spiro Agnew                                                   Alben Barkley                                   

George H.W. Bush                                          Lyndon Johnson

Dan Quayle                                                     Hubert Humphrey

Dick Cheney                                                   Walter Mondale

                                                                        Al Gore

                                                                        Joe Biden

Republican Candidates                                    Democratic Candidates

Earl Warren                                                       John Sparkman

Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr.                                     Estes Kefauver

William E. Miller                                              Ed Muskie

Bob Dole                                                           Sargent Shriver

Jack Kemp                                                        Geraldine Ferraro

Sarah Palin                                                        Joe Lieberman

                                                                          John Edwards

Now let’s ask if these were the right people to put in the relief driver’s seat.  The first cut:

Each party has had two VPs who later ran for and won the presidency (I won’t insult you by naming them.)  The Republicans have had two VPs who lost (Papa Bush is on both lists), the Democrats three. 

            But digging deeper, how about the general quality of the choices?  We could look at it this way:  Were any of the losing or non-running VPs plausible presidential candidates?

Obviously the five who ran (Bush, Dole, Humphrey, Mondale, Gore) were.  Judging from history, Kefauver, who would have been the nominee in 1952 if primaries had functioned as they do now, Ed Muskie, and Joe Biden could easily be added to the list.  Equally obviously, Spiro Agnew and John Edwards scandaled or grafted themselves out of the running.  On the Republican side, I’d give a loud no to Quayle, Cheney, and Palin, as well as William E. Miller who, although only 50 when he lost in 1964 left public life completely thereafter.  I would give a yes to the early Republican losers, Warren and Lodge, though neither ever expressed interest in the presidency.  That’s three yeses and five no’s for the Republicans; five yeses and one no for the Democrats.  (Let’s pair Jack Kemp and Geraldine Ferraro as unlkelies but not no’s; we’ll get to Sargent Shriver and a few early ones later.)

Oddly, each party has had one VP candidate they would later consider as a traitor: Warren and Lieberman. Taking this a step further, while no Democrats other than Lieberman would be rejected by their party if they were running today, Warren (usually labeled “progressive”) and Lodge (“moderate internationalist”) would be as unlikely to finish in the running today as John Huntsman did. 

In the broadest sense, which party has nominated more people whom history might regard as “great Americans”?  In Tier One I’d put Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson, whose records in Civil Rights alone earn them that honor.  Humphrey, Lodge, and Warren come close, for their many impacts on history and the extent of their service.  George H.W. Bush is the only other Republican contender, and perhaps deserves a Tier 3 slot. (I’m steering clear of Bush and Iran-Contra, as I have with Johnson and Vietnam, Truman and the atomic bomb.) Gore, Mondale and Muskie all deserve mention, perhaps a notch below Bush, though Gore’s the only Nobel Prize winner among these VPs.  Sargent Shriver may in fact rank higher than several of these: his role in starting the Peace Corps, Job Corps, and Head Start match Warren’s for long-term impact.  Then there’s Kefauver, who not only could have been president, but also was one of the bravest Democrats of his generation, one of three southern Democrats (with Al Gore’s father and Lyndon Johnson) to refuse to sign the Southern Manifesto of 1956, objecting to Brown vs. Board of Education.

Finally, there’s the category of disgraces and laughingstocks. John Edwards’ certainly belongs here, but his personal sins pale in comparison to the crimes of Nixon and Agnew, while the sheer triviality of Palin, Miller, and Quayle are unmatched in Democratic circles. Considering life after the VP run, far more Democrats than Republicans made contributions after their moment or years in the VP spotlight: Gore, Ferraro (UN Commission on Human Rights), Mondale (Ambassador to Japan, Minnesota A.G.), John Sparkman, Kefauver, Alben Barkley, Lieberman (all returned to the Senate), Ed Muskie (Secretary of State).  Only Dole and Warren played significant roles after their Vice Presidential runs.

Summing up: which party shows the better business sense in getting the right people on the vice presidential bus?  In my book, the Democrats come out way ahead; since 1960, only Bob Dole and Papa Bush have been people of stature, while Nixon, Agnew, Quayle and Palin (and I’d add Cheney) have been disasters or embarrassments.  Post-World War II, all the vice presidents or candidates whose major achievements will go down in history unmarred by their crimes are either Democrats or old Republicans who would be thoroughly repudiated today.

Next: “Confront the Brutal Facts”

Brain Damage

As readers of this blog will have noted, I write often about the hubris of scientists, especially evolutionary biologists and neuroscientists, who are trying to reduce human behavior to the most primitive level of unconscious, uncontrollable, and irrational reflexes, born out of random mutations and their utility in species survival.

            I used to think that some institutions had my back on this, notably the Jesuits, who educated me for eight crucial years. Reading Plato as early as high school, and taking courses in Logic and Epistemology, Metaphysics, Ethics, and the like every semester of college, I was proud of the inquiry tradition of these schools.  (For those who might think Catholic education is necessarily blindered, please read philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s chapters on Notre Dame and BYU in Cultivating Humanity; and remember the Jesuits are well to the left of the Holy Cross fathers.)

            So I was delighted, at first, to see an article about a young scientist at my alma mater who had received a national grant for her work.  The piece, entitled “Moral Compass,” described the work of a woman studying “what she calls moral intuition.” My school seemed to be continuing the tradition of asking the Big Questions, as did Jesus, Aquinas, Kant, and all those moral giants we were introduced to in our philosophy and theology classes.

But my hopes were dashed when I found that the scholar was approaching the problem with the tools of neurology, not philosophy, in her ominously named “morality lab.”  Specifically, she was using Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation to jolt the brain’s right temporoparietal junction (RTPJ), then used functionalMRI to watch brain activity as subjects heard about a person who tried but failed to poison a friend.  The conclusion: people who have had that part of their brain temporarily zapped are more lenient toward the failed attempt than unzapped subjects.

All well and good, if a little truncated perhaps for the reading audience.  We all pretty much know that damage to various parts of the brain can cause behavioral changes (from aggression to depression to lack of judgment), as well as that using various parts of the brain can develop greater connections and even greater overall size of those parts (London cab-drivers with large geographic memories, violinists with more developed hand areas).  But the article went on to quote the young scientist thus: “For a while now, I’ve been really interested in moral intuitions and where they come from—and the extent to which people share these intuitions.  When someone has a different set of intuitions, how do you know who’s right?”

That last sentence floored me for two reasons: that where moral intuitions come from is answerable in terms of synaptic locations, and even more, that knowing who’s right could be determined by examining the brain activity of the person having the intuition.           

Moral intuitions apparently mean immediate judgments, as studied in such classes as Harvard professor Michael Sandel’s “Justice,” widely available on the Internet.  In these studies, people are asked to respond quickly to a case, then to examine the validity of their intuition, and to elucidate possible reasons for and against it.  (The young scientist in question apparently attended exactly this class, which set her off on her career path.)

Are these intuitions instantaneous eruptions from a segment of our brain, or are they more the result of life’s experience, both direct and indirect?  Since the publication of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink, there has been a lot of discussion of this question, and most writers and researchers have concluded that our “intuition,” as in his cases of art critics who doubted a statue’s authenticity, and tennis players who could predict faults on serves as soon as the stroke was beginning, is most valid when it is a rapid judgment based on long familiarity with a given situation.  Isn’t it likely that “moral intuitions” are more likely to be right when they’re grounded in years of thought, discussion, reading, and life experience?  (The child’s outburst that “it’s not fair” that rain spoiled the trip to the beach surely isn’t of the same validity as the later declaration that “it’s not fair” that he should be punished for cheating on a paper when he didn’t do so.)

So if I were asked where a moral judgment came from, I would suggest many possible answers: universal perceptions of what is harmful to oneself or to others, cultural upbringing, social conditions, ethical reflection, and on and on.  “Above and behind the right ear” would never even occur to me.  Would it to you?

It’s interesting that Socrates took up the same issue over two millennia ago.  While in prison, he tells us:

“I heard someone who had a book of Anaxagoras, out of which he read that mind was the disposer and cause of all, and I was quite delighted at the notion of this… What hopes I had formed, and how grievously was I disappointed! As I proceeded, I found my philosopher altogether forsaking mind or any other principle of order…I might compare him to a person who…when he endeavored to explain the causes of my actions, went on to show that I sit here because my body is made up of bones and muscles; and the bones, as he would say, are hard and have ligaments which divide them, and the muscles are elastic, and they cover the bones, which have also a covering or environment of flesh and skin which contains them; and as the bones are lifted at their joints by the contraction or relaxation of the muscles, I am able to bend my limbs, and this is why I am sitting here in a curved posture… forgetting to mention the true cause, which is that the Athenians have thought fit to condemn me, and accordingly I have thought it better and more right to remain here and undergo my sentence…

There is surely a strange confusion of causes and conditions in all this. It may be said, indeed, that without bones and muscles and the other parts of the body I cannot execute my purposes. But to say that I do as I do because of them, and that this is the way in which mind acts, and not from the choice of the best, is a very careless and idle mode of speaking. I wonder that they cannot distinguish the cause from the condition.”

That same error of confusing causes and conditions is apparently still with us.

Further, what exactly does the study, or the snippet from it the college magazine published, tell us?  That people are more lenient toward the person who fails to commit a misdeed when their RTPJ is disrupted.  Not only do we not know whether we’re talking about averages, or the same people under two circumstances.  We also don’t know whether they judged these would-be killers extremely harshly and then somewhat less harshly, or fairly harshly and then very leniently.  Or whether a disrupted RTPJ left them with more scope to consider the situation in a broader light, or made them indifferent to the matter and so less punitive.

Most of all, how could this study in any way tell us which moral intuition was right?  Is any moral intuition by a person with an apparently whole RTPJ “right”?  If two people whose RTPJs appear similar come to different judgments, who’s right?  Whatever the truth of the old question whether “ought” can be derived from “is,” there’s not much likelihood of ever being able to prove that a point of view is right by examining the neuro-bio-electro-chemical events that accompany holding or stating that point of view.

If we could do that, imagine the effects.  No need for debates to choose a candidate – just put them in the scanner.  Criminals could prove their innocence by showing a clean RTPJ or whatever other locus was relevant, or could plead the “defective RTPJ” defense.  Unless we could agree on the precise definition of health or superiority in RTPJs, we could always dismiss others’ views:  this liberal has an overactive RTPJ, that conservative an underactive one, so he is too soft-hearted, she’s too severe.  (Maybe we could define a healthy RTPJ as the site of Right, True, and Proper Judgments.)

One way of looking at this project is that it’s running backward.  It makes perfect sense to examine the brains of people whose views or actions are highly atypical, to see if there’s a biological contribution: does the dyslexic, autistic or sociopathic person have a specific brain abnormality?  Does the gifted person have some different abnormality? (The second has so far been much harder to come upon than the first.) But when two apparently normal people hold differing moral intuitions, say on war, capital punishment, abortion, or hate speech, does it make any sense to think that we can examine their brains to find out not only why they differ (I expect there are dozens of places in the brain, from memories to emotions to others we can barely dream of, that go into a complex decision), but to say who is right?

We need, and I believe will always need, separate criteria for deciding what is right and for discovering what neural correlates happen when we make a moral choice. Trying to do otherwise can lead in one of two directions: fruitless quests to find moral and immoral synapses, or frightening efforts to control behavior by altering the brains of the morally wrong.  Nazi eugenics were bad enough, but judging and condemning people for the state of their brains as others were once judged and exterminated because of their noses or foreheads would be even more disastrous.

           

           

My own Shangri-Las

“No utopia has ever been described in which any sane man would on any conditions consent to live, if he could possibly escape.”                                                                                    -- Alexander Gray

            While Gray may be right about the utopias of social engineers, from Plato to Skinner, I think many of us would be happy to live in the worlds created by imaginative writers, past and present.  As a boy, I lost myself in King Arthur’s and Robin Hood’s England, Tarzan’s Africa, Arthur Ransome’s Swallowdale, and many others.  C.S. Lewis’s Narnia and J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth came later and lasted much longer; I still dip into their Otherworlds occasionally.

            But these days I have less interest in dwelling among knights, apes, fauns or hobbits, and more in imagining plausible communities of ordinary, or not so ordinary, humans who promise a richer moral and social life than exists in contemporary America.  In my reading over the past few years I’ve found three such imaginary places, all of which I share with others as often as possible.  Two are from the frequently underestimated world of mystery writing, and one from a master of the short story, the novel, the essay, and the lyric poem.

            To start with the detectives, my first recommendation is  P.A. Gaus’s Amish mysteries.  Gaus, a college professor in Ohio’s Amish country (despite Pennsylvania’s greater prominence, Ohio’s Amish population is equally large), has written seven – and counting – mysteries in which the pacific world of the Amish is rent by violence, and three “English” characters (as the Amish call all outsiders), come to their assistance.  The primary one of these is, oddly enough, a local college professor, ironically, of military history.  (Gaus himself was a chemist until his recent retirement; obviously no connection there.) 

Along with his alter ego, the irascible local sheriff, and occasional help from a non-Amish pastor and carpenter, Professor Michael Branden often takes on himself the burden of protecting those who will not fight either to avenge or to defend themselves. In one novel, an Amish bishop explains why his people believe so completely in non-violence:  “We are taught that we are to be harmless as doves.  It means a lot of things, but one thing is that the harm we do is always harmful to us, if for no other reason than the guilt that we shoulder for it.”   Like HBO’s The Newsroom,” some will find these books “preachy,” but in my view they’re none the worse for that, and the leaven of crime and mystery can attract even readers who may slide over the homilies – to their own detriment.  (The novels, beginning with The Blood of the Prodigal, are published by Plume.)

A more secular Shangri-la can be found in the woods of southern Quebec, in Louise Penny’s Three Pines, the setting of another ongoing series featuring Inspector Armande Gamache of the Sureté de Quebec (the Chief Inspector for the whole Francophone province).  Penny has won an extraordinary number of mystery writer awards, so a lort of people must agree with me.

Three Pines is a hidden gem of a village, with a gourmet bistro, a bookstore, several practicing artists, a national treasure of a poet, a great house with a grim history, and, unfortunately, a penchant for attracting murderers as well as refugees from the urban world.

Penny’s novels delve much deeper into the art of the mystery novel: Gamache is a French Canadian version of such thoughtful British sleuths as Inspector Dalgleish and Lord Peter Wimsey (note that they were all created by women, and none is a muscular, quick-on-the-draw Lothario).  His skill is not the ratiocinative brilliance of Holmes, but an ability to delve deep into human motivation; he always insists that the strangest crime makes complete sense if seen from the viewpoint of the killer, and that the roots of crime are often buried far in the past. 

Gamache is also a deeply kind man, giving second chances to junior officers who have failed and even betrayed him.  He serves as a center around whom circle a collection of complicated characters, especially in Three Pines, which is home, among others, to a gay couple who own the bistro and the B&B, a former psychologist now running the bookstore, and Ruth Zardo, a brilliant poet with a heart of – well something slightly soft – buried beneath geological layers of rage.  Penny also has two unusual characteristics for a series writer – she can allow her characters to change radically (or reveal totally unexpected layers), and, like David Simon in The Wire and Treme, has not hesitated to shock us with the loss of favorites from her cast.  Every new Penny therefore, is not only a whodunit, but a who will surprise us and how.  (The first in the series is Still Life; all are published by Minotaur.)

Wendell Berry’s Port William Kentucky, like Ohio’s Amish country, is an American enclave in which different mores and values survive the political and economic distortion that so plagues most of our world.   The key term in Berry’s vision is “membership.”  In his good society, people understand that they are connected by more than blood, marriage, proximity, or even friendship.  Rather they are connected by a common humanity that appears sometimes as secular, sometimes as spiritual.  As one of the town’s eldest members says, "The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain't in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don't." 

Being members of each other means many things to Berry’s characters.  It means protecting a stranger who is hurt in a Saturday night brawl; it means helping a young couple purchase a farm where they had worked for years, but to which they have no legal claim; it means taking care of a drunken uncle who falls again and again, without ever hoping that he will change, and it means loving a woman from afar all her life, just because you believe she deserves to have someone love her.

It does not mean living in eternal peace and harmony.  In and around Port William there are not only town drunks; there are abusive husbands, greedy landowners, thieves, and even an occasional murder.  Because of course there are those who don’t know or won’t admit they are members of each other.   For the ones who do, however, there is a deep awareness that we are more than producers and consumers.  As an older character says to a younger, “we’re dealing in goods and services that we didn’t make, that can’t exist at all except as gifts.  Everything about a place that’s different from its price is a gift.  Everything about a man or woman that’s different from their price is a gift.  The life of a neighborhood is a gift…you’re friends and neighbors, you work together, and so there’s lots of giving and taking without a price – some that you don’t remember, some that you never knew about.  You don’t send a bill. You don’t, if you can help it, keep an account.  Once the account is kept and the bill presented, the friendship ends, the neighborhood is finished.”

That’s the kind of Shangri-la that just might exist, or be brought into existence for a time, like an evanescent subatomic particle.  I’d like to be there when it happened.  I’d like to help make it happen.

 

(Berry’s Port William appears and reappears in novels and short stories over the past half century, and tell about more than a century of the town’s life. His short stories are collected in That Distant Land; among his several novels my favorite is Jayber Crow.  Most are published by Counterpoint.)

           

           

           

The National Collegiate Almighty Association

“While the future's there for anyone to change, still you know it seems/It would be easier sometimes to change the past.”                                       --  Jackson Browne

What is the most powerful force on our planet, or maybe the cosmos?  Evidently it’s the NCAA.  Apparently they have two powers no other earthly body has: they can change the past and they can punish the dead.  Yes, the old Soviet Union and many other dictatorships have tried, airbrushing out the now-out-of-favor from photographs, altering historical records, and such.  Countries try to change the past: Turkey insists it never practiced genocide on the Armenians.  But there’s always someone, often the world’s majority, to call them on it.

In ancient times – what we used to call the Dark Ages -- some nations and religions would dig up corpses and drive stakes through their hearts, burn, or hang them for purported misdeeds.  You’d think we’d be beyond such primitive thinking. 

But the NCAA has borrowed from the playbooks of the Inquisition and the Stalinist era in its sanctions against Penn State.

True, sports authorities have sometimes changed the past, but with great inconsistency.  Sign a wrong scorecard in golf, and you either get the poorer score you signed, or forfeit if you signed a better score than you made. So your birdie is now a par, your par a bogie.  But that’s in the rulebook.  For decades, almost every sport refused to change a wrong call in the immediate past, except for umpires in tennis over-ruling line calls.  Now we have instant replay in one baseball event, and many football, basketball, and hockey situations.  But baseball refuses to correct an obviously wrong call, even when it costs a player a perfect game and does not alter the game’s outcome in any way.  And soccer absolutely will not sanction corrections, even though its referees have an impossible real-time job.

Sports also change the past when a violation has been discovered that falsifies the game’s outcome – ineligible players, drug enhancements, etc.  Of course they do this with total inconsistency too:  Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, and Mark McGwire still hold over a dozen home run records despite steroid use, while cyclists and Olympic athletes are stripped of their titles for the same infraction. 

In the so-called real world, very few democracies change the past because of later discoveries.  Imagine if they did: Colin Powell stripped of his rank because he later told the UN that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction on railroad cars.  Ronald Reagan and George Bush’s names removed from all airports and other public buildings if future documentation proves them complicit in Iran-Contra.  Let’s not even mention J. Edgar Hoover.

One fundamental principle in our civil and criminal society is that the dead cannot be held accountable for their misdeeds. When Ken Lay died in prison, his conviction was vacated, not because of any new evidence, but because his appeal had not run its course.  You can’t try a dead person, so you can’t convict him.  Innocent until proven guilty, especially in the afterlife.

Now we come to Penn State.  Because of allegations that involve one deceased coach and one former coach, a team loses thirteen years of games that it once won, perhaps the largest reality alteration in the history of sports. Who can doubt that the punishment is aimed primarily at the late Joe Paterno, condemned in the Freeh report post-mortem by the testimony of the indicted and disgraced living?  During the years of the forfeits, Penn State players won two Butkus awards (Lavar Arrington and Paul Poslusny).  If they made no  tackles in those years, do they forfeit the awards as well?  Does every Penn State player who was drafted in those years get undrafted because he did nothing during his college days?

            This is not to excuse anything done by Joe Paterno or anyone else at Penn State.  As Marc Antony said of Caesar, “If it were so, it was a grievous fault, and grievously hath [he] answered for it.”  But to pursue a man beyond the grave serves no rational purpose: does the NCAA really think we need to deter future sports programs from similar behaviors?  Does it claim that if Penn State had turned in Sandusky in 2001, when the crime occurred in the athletic facility, its football program would have been devastated retroactively to 1999?  Do we benefit as a society by punishing the dead and by imagining that a declaration can alter history, even the small history that is college sports?  I think not.  The best thing about the NCAA decision is its fine of Penn State and designation of the money for abuse prevention.  Most of us hope we can change the future: only time travel movies try to do it by changing the past.

For the Birds

            No, I don’t spend all my time indoors reading and carping.  Sometimes I turn my curmudgeonry toward the natural world, especially out here on Martha’s Vineyard.  Last year, for example, I squirrel-proofed my bird feeders by stringing them (the feeders, not the squirrels) from thin wires between the house and a tree – six or more feet high. With no tightrope wide enough for their skills, the gray robbers are content to pick up what the birds drop, like the family dog lying under the chair of the sloppiest eater among the children.

            Victory – but short-lived.  After a week or so, the colorful array of finches, cardinals, bluejays, redwing blackbirds, chickadees and others were almost entirely driven off by a large and growing mob of grackles. 

Note to the pedantic: there is no term of venery for grackles as there is for owls (parliament), quail (bevy), starlings (murmuration), or, most hyperbolic, wrens (herd? Who thought that up?).  One blogger has suggested flash mob, which does capture their abruptness, but is much too pleasant.  I think they should be put in the lineup with their bigger cousins: a murder of crows and a mugging of grackles sounds about right to me.  Subnote: the British use “grackles” to refer to mobs of tourists – one of the best Britishisms since “bumph,” which means both toilet paper and any tedious pile of paper that requires your reluctant attention.

            But back to quiscalus quiscula. (The dictionary makers list this odd name as “of uncertain origin,” and suggest a possibility that it comes from the Spanish quisquilla, worthless fellow.  Sounds apt to me – maybe it all goes back to the Latin “who” as in “Who the hell are these birds anyway?”)  I called my good birding friend Peter Tacy in Connecticut, who advised me on these Mafiosi -- the black and purple combo suggests a similar fashion sense, doesn’t it?  Peter explained that grackles shift from insects to seeds after mating, that they do indeed take over feeders, and that they can not only chase off smaller birds, but also add them to their diets.  His suggested cure was to put out unattractive food, such as nyger thistle seeds, which worked well, except that almost no one else liked the seeds either and they got wet and clogged up the feeder.

            Fast forward to this June, when I opened up my wallet for a specifically designed nyger feeder (the little birds seem much happier with this one, especially a mated pair of finches who often dine together), and a large-bird-proof feeder that shuts down when anyone heavier than a cardinal tries to eat by perching on its ring.

            At last we have a winner, and a source of great entertainment.  The jays stop by occasionally, but give up almost instantly.  Everyone else dines successfully.  But best of all is watching a grackle spend several minutes trying to beat the system. 

            First he lands and tries a feeder hole, but it’s closed.  He studies it, then moves to the next hole. (There are six.) Still no joy.  He glances up again at the tube, where he sees plenty of seed.  So he looks into a hole, which of course is not a hole as long as he is perched.  Around the perching ring again a few times.  Now he stretches high up to stare right into the cylinder.  Looks like seed from here too, he must think.  Around the ring again, checking holes, up to look at the seed.  Then (for he doesn’t worry about predators as do almost all the other birds), he looks around for the culprit.  Am I being punked?  Where’s Ashton Kutcher?  Around again, check the holes, check the tube.  Then straight up as if imploring the Great Grackle in the Sky for help.  For a good five minutes I watch him, as smaller birds perch on the wire, balancing caution and hope.  Finally he gives up.  I turn my head to watch him fly, and when I snap back to the feeder, the house finches are already dining. 

            Ah, sweet triumph!  Anyone know a parallel strategy for the mob feeders at Morgan Stanley, Barclays, etc., etc.?           

Appealing to a Higher Court

            Although the Supreme Court has allowed the Affordable Health Care Act to stand, there are those who still contend that, like birth control and artificial insemination, the act is against the Natural Law, as developed primarily in the Christian tradition over two millennia.  Amherst legal scholar Hadley Arkes has been a prime advocate of this view in numerous articles, including  “Natural Rights Trumps Obamacare, Or Should” in the magazine First Things, December 2011.  As a card-carrying Jesuit fellow traveler, I couldn’t help trying my hand at a response.  For those of you interested, here’s what I had to say:

            Five hundred years before Christ, Heraclitus observed, “although the Logos is common to all, most men live as if each of them had a private intelligence of his own.” Heraclitus’s Logos, like the Dao or the Natural Law (mutatis mutandis), defines the principles which govern the universe, and from which humans stray at their peril. Hadley Arkes’s natural law challenge to America’s health care plan substitutes a private intelligence for well-defined principles of natural law, possibly to identify the author’s position with more universal concepts than a particular constitutional theory.

The challenge needs to be examined on several levels. At the highest, is there a reasoned basis for believing that natural law is incompatible with universal health care? Is there consensus among natural law authorities, or in common practice, for this belief? Finally, assuming no disqualifying argument against universal health care, is there evidence that such a system would be inferior to the prior one as regards its effect on the natural rights of Americans?

Arkes evidently perceives two ways in which mandated health care violates natural law. The first is that the law abrogates a specific natural right. Quoting a recent legal brief, Arkes maintains that “Imposing on people a contract they do not want would be quite as wrong as dissolving, without their consent, a contract they had knowingly made.” Oddly, the statement is itself entirely correct, but the implication drawn from it entirely wrong. As a citizen, I have multiple contracts imposed on me that I may or may not want: to pay taxes, to contribute to Social Security and Medicare, to serve my country if called in time of war, to support any children I may have helped conceive, and on and on. I may also have contracts I have knowingly made dissolved without my consent, including both unlawful contracts (e.g. murder for hire), contracts lawful but restricted (e.g. bigamous marriages), and contracts entirely lawful but overridden by the concerns of the state (e.g. property contracts abrogated by eminent domain).

Arkes’s second, more powerful objection is based on the possibility that mandated health care would impinge upon the fundamental right to life. Arkes makes this contention twice, first asserting, “The generous provision of care to the poor would come along with controls that could deny to ordinary people the medical care they would regard as necessary to the preservation of their own lives, perhaps even when they were willing to pay for that care themselves,” and again, “this scheme of national medical care is virtually bound to produce a scheme of rationing, as it has produced that rationing in Britain and Canada, denying medical care to people now entirely reliant on the government for their care. The serious question then is whether this denial to people of the means to preserve their own lives, with means quite legitimate, touches the ground of natural rights. 

I believe that it does.”

This position, though dramatically stated, totters on not one, but four cracked legs. First, it contends that these harms “could,” and more strongly are “virtually bound” to happen, offering in evidence only that they have allegedly come about in two other counties. This contention can be challenged in two ways. Empirically, there are more than thirty countries with universal health care, so experience in two is not proof of inevitability, or even likelihood. But there is also a rational objection. Actions that have a possible, or even highly likely, outcome may be entirely permissible if precautions can be taken to avoid the outcome, or if the action is the only apparent way to avoid a worse result. A surgery virtually bound to result in the death of a patient may still be ethical, even when the patient is physically unable to give consent, if it is deemed to be the patient’s only hope. A rescue effort likely to result in the death of the rescuer is still legitimate, even heroic, when the same action (plunging into a raging torrent, for example), would be suicidal if not for the intent of the rescuer.

Even if rationing were to evolve, it need not deny people “the means to preserve their own life.” A society may deny orthopedic or other corrective surgery for very elderly patients or others whose lives are minimally affected by their physical limitation, yet offer all available interventions to patients with life-threatening diseases.

Further, no system could leave people “entirely reliant on the government for their care,” unless it were combined with draconian regulations against travel that would themselves be against all contemporary standards of natural rights. This last point deserved further examination, particularly in light of the rationale for adopting universal health care.

            Here, to invert Anatole France’s quip that “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread,” we can say the law equally allows rich and poor to travel abroad for health care denied them at home. Even today, large numbers of Americans – estimates range as high as 1.3 million – seek medical care abroad. Some even travel to Canada, especially to the Shouldice Hospital for hernia care, as well as to Mexico, Thailand, and other countries. Estimates of global medical tourism run into the several millions.

While the wealthy – or even comfortable, since an international trip plus treatment may cost less than the same in a U.S. hospital – could seek whatever means of life preservation they desire, those now unable to afford medical care would be assured of the means to preserve life, at least to a greater extent than under the present system.

If there is no rational conflict between universal health care and natural law, does informed opinion favor that position? Apparently not. The Roman Catholic Church, for example, has consistently described universal health care as both a right of persons and a duty of governments. As Richard McBrien noted in the National Catholic Reporter (October 5, 2009), “The teaching that health care is a right rather than a privilege was articulated by Pope John XXIII in his encyclical, Pacem in Terris....The pope began that encyclical with a list of rights, the first set of which pertained to the right to life and a worthy standard of living. Included in these rights were the right to ‘food, clothing, shelter, medical care, rest and finally the necessary social services.’” More recently, Catholic News Service reported, “Pope Benedict XVI and other church leaders said it was the moral responsibility of nations to guarantee access to health care for all of their citizens, regardless of social and economic status or their ability to pay. Access to adequate medical attention, the pope said in a written message Nov. 18, was one of the ‘inalienable rights’ of man.” (November 18, 2010) The same view has been consistently held by the American hierarchy, as in recent testimony before Congress: “As national debate about a major Congressional health care bill continues, the U.S. bishops have called for ‘genuine’ health care reform that protects human life and provides comprehensive health care access. Bishop of Rockville Centre, New York William F. Murphy, writing a July 17 letter to Congress on behalf of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), commented: ‘Genuine health care reform that protects the life and dignity of all is a moral imperative and a vital national obligation.’” (Catholic News Agency, July 22, 2009).

            This last item suggests a further place to seek common wisdom regarding natural law and health care. As implied by Bishop Murphy, natural law requires respect for human life from conception. We might therefore suppose that state opposition to abortion and to universal health care would go hand in hand. Yet the eleven European countries – all with overwhelming Catholic or Orthodox majorities –prohibiting abortion all provide universal health care, as do the four largest South American (and Catholic) countries prohibiting abortion.

            If the rational case against universal health care lacks substance, and the weight of opinion among Christian leaders and nations favors such care, can we examine empirically whether mandated health care in fact tends toward the preservation of natural rights?  

            If as Professor Arkes correctly notes, the ability to preserve life “with means quite legitimate” is a part of natural law, the current America health system is far worse than those of most developed countries at preserving that right. (A problem arises, of course, when “legitimate” is introduced into a discussion based on natural law. Certain means of preserving life, such as killing another to provide yourself with a lifesaving part of that person’s body, may be illegitimate. Many forms of legitimacy, however, are arbitrary decisions of governments or societies, and may have some, or no, basis in natural law. A Hindu, for example, may find killing a cow to provide life-saving human nourishment to be illegitimate, without in any way deriving this decision from natural law.)

            Not only is American life expectancy lower than in 19 of 23 European, North American, and Pacific countries, and newborn mortality levels and indices of child well-being equally low or lower, but we “lead” the rest of the civilized world in the number of people who die of curable illnesses before age 75, and trail in years of healthy life expectancy for those over 60. During this century, each of these countries, even financially beleaguered Greece, have reduced deaths from amenable causes (so-called “avoidable mortality”) at rates at least twice as fast as has the U.S. Journalist T.R. Reid observed in 2010 that “Government and academic studies reported that more than 20,000 Americans die in the prime of life each year from medical problems that could be treated, because they can’t afford to see a doctor.”  More than 100,000 avoidable deaths occur each year in America, from this and other causes.

            Given these facts, can we understand, if not agree, with Professor Arkes’s position? Several of his points offer a possible answer. Although the phrase “natural law” appears prominently at the beginning of his article, it is far from central to his case. The term itself appears only seven times in the text (as opposed to 24, for example, for “government” and 15 for “constitution”). He focuses primarily on Constitutional law, historical precedents and concern for “the vast enlargement of the reach and powers of the state.” Despite his title, he openly states that “the most serious argument against Obamacare is that it threatens to change the American regime in a grave way: that it sweeps past the constitutional restraints intended to ensure a federal government ‘limited’ in its ends, confined to certain ‘enumerated’ powers, and respecting a domain of local responsibilities that it has no need or rationale for displacing.” 



            These arguments are serious ones, and can and should stand on their own, rather than attempting to climb onto the shoulders of the natural law. But beneath a commitment to originalism and limited government is an unexamined premise with greater explanatory power.

In invoking the natural law Arkes speaks entirely of natural rights, and never mentions natural duties. However, in such sources as the Catholic Encyclopedia, natural law is identified with duties, rather than rights. (Not to deny that duties and rights are often obverse and reverse of the same principle.)  In Arkes’s rights-focused (dare we say libertarian?) discussion, an individual right to preserve life is paramount, but the duty to see that others’ lives are preserved is nowhere mentioned. This and the off-hand assertion of “a natural right not be coerced into buying things we have no wish to buy,” and fears of government power, all suggest that the individual’s right to make choices is the foundation of Arkes’s edifice.

It may be more than a linguistic anomaly that this places the natural law argument on the “pro-choice” side. For in espousing a radical (in the etymological if not the political sense) commitment to individual choice, Arkes aligns himself with one of the chief ailments of our age.  As David Bentley Hart observes in Atheist Delusions, “In even our gravest political and ethical debates—regarding economic policy, abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide, censorship, genetic engineering, and so on—‘choice’ is a principle not only frequently invoked, by one side or both, but often seeming to exercise an almost mystical supremacy over all other concerns.”  It should not exercise such supremacy over health care for all Americans.

           

Evolution Makes Me Do It

            However it may be challenged technically, Karl Popper’s idea that an argument or hypothesis needs to be falsifiable in order to be judged as scientific is a useful thought tool.  My father used to say, for example, that superstitious people could never be persuaded of their errors because they could always come up with a defense of their belief.  If their rabbit’s foot didn’t bring good luck, he explained, they would say it was the wrong foot, cut off at the wrong time, or whatever else worked for them.  People who believe the world will end on a certain date usually wake up the morning after convinced they just need to reread the texts or redo the calculations, or that they prayed the problem away.

            Evolutionary explanations, when over-applied, follow the same illogic.  Fidelity and infidelity, kindness and cruelty, altruism and selfishness, monogamy and polygamy, all have “good” evolutionary explanations.  Why?  Because no mental or physical condition or behavior could exist if it didn’t provide an evolutionary advantage.  So all we have to do is come up with a logical-sounding, untestable theory, and we’ve “explained” it in evolutionary terms.

            There are, however, serious objections to this line of thinking.  The first, of course, is that any explanation that can’t be falsified is no explanation at all.  Evolutionary theorists provide an evolutionary “explanation” for any human trait, including its opposite.  All such theories are based on conjecture, some of it supported to a degree by brain science, others simply guesswork.  Take optimism and pessimism for example.

            According to Tali Sharot in The Optimism Bias  “It is tempting to speculate that optimism was selected for during evolution precisely because positive expectations enhance the probability of survival.  The fact that optimists live longer and are healthier, combined with statistics indicating that most humans display optimistic biases, together with recent data linking optimism to specific genes, strongly supports this hypothesis.”  So evolution selected for optimism because it made people hopeful, perhaps they overcame setbacks more readily – and perhaps a cheerful spouse was more appealing than a gloomy one (because, of course, the partner recognized that a cheerful spouse was a better bet to live longer and be more fertile, or at least more enthusiastic about procreation). 

            So why are there so many pessimists around?  Well, according to http://ironshrink.com,

“Pessimism, like snake and spider phobias, may be an adaptation that promotes survival. Our ancestors would have been poorly served by joyfully sniffing every flower while they were hunting for lunch. Better they should have assumed that the world is a dangerous place. A bit of well-placed pessimism would lead them to watch for predators, pitfalls, and creepy-crawlies. But more than sensitizing our ancestors to dangers, pessimism helped to solve problems. According to psychologist Robert Leahy, “pessimism, avoidance, and retreat” were frequently the best strategies for survival in the primitive environment.”

            Likewise, once theorists had established to their satisfaction that “fight or flight” was ingrained in us by selection processes, others decided that “tend and befriend” was just as useful, and was also selected for.  A recent piece I read even suggested that gossip had an evolutionary advantage.  That seems puzzling to me.  To gossip you need two things: language and secrets.  Is it really possible that we developed language and closed doors among hunter-gatherers who were in each other’s company 24-7 far enough back in evolutionary time to allow gossip to be selected for?  I rather think that gossip would be likelier to get the gossiper killed at a time when secrets would have been hard to keep and the reaction of a pissed-off neighbor whose sexual prowess had been under discussion was likely to have been a rock or a club.

            And on the theories go.  Homosexuality is, of course, a giant stumbling block, since it seems the perfect evolutionary disadvantage.  But this doesn’t stop the ingenious evolutionist.  Maybe being gay makes you more available to help raise your siblings’ kids, and so perpetuates your genes.  (The perfect family: Mom and Dad, Uncle Bruce and Uncle Randy, Aunt Butch and Aunt Biker, and ten or so little ones perpetuating a whole bundle of everyone’s genes.)  Or else, men who are more “feminine” are appealing to women as nurturers, and so may get in ahead of Mr. Macho, even if they’re only slightly interested in the ladies.  (I suppose the correlate is that tough women appealed to men because they could handle the saber-tooth better and save the kids while dad’s out bringing home the wart hog bacon.)

            And here’s the perfect evolutionary out – maybe it’s sort of an accident.  Maybe fairly delicate and kind men are appealing, but in some cases the genes just go overboard and -- whoops – no gene survival for Uncle Bruce.  Though evolutionists seem to have abandoned the old stories about elks whose antlers got too big for them to walk, this out is always available, and further illustrates the “I can explain everything” nature of overdone evolutionary theory.

            Accidents are the latest form of the evolutionary escape clause. If any sort of minimally plausible evolutionary reason can be given for something existing in humans today, then that proves the point.  However when forced into a non-advantageous corner (think appendices, blind spots in the eye, and other anomalies), then the case falls back on the Kluge factor, to quote Gary Marcus’s title for his book, subtitled “The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind.”  Lots of stuff, like Topsy, just grew, because it had to make do with what was available at the evolutionary moment.  So on the one hand, we have no need for a Designer, because evolution can do the job all by itself.  Furthermore, the fact that evolution does a poor job, giving us nipples on men, sickle cell, bad backs, bum knees, and other irritations, is a second proof that there isn’t a Designer.  For me, both God and Evolution are equally likely to be misused as conversation-stopping Theories of Everything.