Culture

Error Deflection

Because it’s come up a few times, and because I feel like a more life-based post is in order, I’d like to hit on a topic that’s come up before: even and especially when making especially important decisions in politics, or the law, how do we choose between two courses of action?

The concept I use to address some of these questions is “error deflection,” a term borrowed from one of my favorite law school professors. It starts by accepting that we act (always) on the basis of imperfect information, and that, especially with hard decisions, mistakes will often result. (“Bad facts make bad law.”)

Accepting the possibility of error, we change the question from “what should I do?” to, “accepting that I may be wrong, how would I like to be wrong?” Mistakes often have consequences, but they’ll always have different consequences. Choices effect results, in success or in error.

This has the effect of changing a question from one about possibilities, to one about values. For example, many choices are intrinsically about risk: do you preserve the status quo, or try to make it better? Error deflection in these cases is all about you. Do you take chances to build a better world? Or is what you have worth defending, and too valuable to potentially lose?

Others, especially in politics, reduce to questions about worldview. The presumption of innocence is nothing more than a conscious choice to always deflect the risk of error in a verdict towards liberty over safety. If we’re going to be wrong, we’d rather free a murderer than jail Valjean. Similarly, the liberal case in national security chooses to deflect error towards the open society. We’d rather take a 1% risk of a terrorist attack than accept the fact (or, 100% likelihood) of a society that profiles on the basis of race. And we don’t believe the ethical calculus of the presumption of innocence alters just because the magnitudes of risk increase across the board. True, freeing a terrorist is a horrifying prospect; but torturing an innocent man, and keeping him from his family until the “cessation of hostilities” is pretty bad too.

The concept works especially well with murky probabilities. Pretend that anthropogenic global warming is a 50% theory — it’s equally likely, in other words, that mankind is or isn’t affecting the climate. We shouldn’t be paralyzed by indecision, because the question of whether to do something about it, once recast, is easy. A 50% chance of human annihilation is worse than a 50% chance of trying to avoid it and failing, no matter how much it costs Exxon. (This is the case I made a few years ago. I’m just updating it for new readers.)

And, error deflection can be romantic! Should you call the girl? Well, it depends. Would you rather know, or always wonder? (And here’s a song all about error deflection: Fires in France, “Love is Strong.”)

Finally, what about the cases where success is impossible? Well, if you have nothing to lose, you might as well try. Sometimes you have to roll the hard six.

(Photo credit to this person.)

The SOPA/PIPA Question as a Quintessentially American Debate

With apologies, again, for delays. Enjoy this picture of subzero skiing as compensation/explanation for my prolonged absence.

How gratifying to see democracy work as well as it has during the SOPA debate. A cadre of lobbyists devise a plan to protect their interests inimical to both the people, and to the larger society; the people fight back; and with alarming alacrity, at a rate comparable to Republicans abandoning Mitt Romney, the lobbyists’ pet representatives jump ship. This is how it’s supposed to work!

For late-comers, the Stop Online Piracy Act is a bill introduced by the lovable Lamar Smith (R-TX), putatively drafted to end commercialized piracy of American intellectual property, especially by overseas actors (like China). This much of the goal is laudable, and drew presidential approval during Obama’s recent State of the Union Address. But SOPA’s mechanism obliterates the safe-harbor provided by the DCMA (the Act that allowed my old firm to successfully defend YouTube’s continued existence, against the assault of Viacom and other content providers), and contemplates a world where content providers may, by simply lodging a protest, see any site that hosts allegedly stolen content shut down without a hearing or chance of reply. Under extreme interpretations of the bill, as originally drafted, this site could be shuttered, in full, on the basis of a copyright complaint about any picture used here without permission. Like the above.

By this late hour, the threat appears at an end, with the Obama administration issuing a thinly-veiled veto threat. But in retrospect, I urge you to look at SOPA as part of a larger narrative, and one liberals (or progressives, if you prefer) blissfully appear to be making some headway. During the darkest depths of the Bush administration, more than a few commentators drew on Ben Franklin’s famous exhortation:

Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.

As a watchword for those worried about the nation’s slow slide into a police state. Freedom, the theory goes, involves risk, but it’s well worth the reward. A free society, which we declare ourselves to be, prefers to allow some chinks in our national security armor rather than to close them all at the price of our liberty of movement, conversation, and discussion.

SOPA presents an identical issue. We’ve come to value the internet as a place for free and unbridled conversation, which knits us closer together and enriches each individual’s cultural experience. The price of that liberty, though, is the continual risk of piracy, and the concomitant loss of profit that entails for content providers. By placing the burden of proof to establish piracy and shut down an offending site on content-owners, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act chose to deflect error towards freedom of expression, rather than airtight protection of intellectual property. SOPA proposed the reverse solution, and failed, to the benefit of all. It’s tempting to view individual skirmishes in the broader political landscape as isolated incidents, but to the extent the defeat of SOPA favors liberty over restraint, it inures to the benefit of the larger society.

Apple and the World You Love

When Steve Jobs passed away last week, one commentator stuck us with this summary of the impact of the ubiquitous iPod/iPhone/iPad triumvirate:

He put white earbuds in the ears of everyone on the planet, and shut us all in to our own little pods of experience.

Harsh, but it doesn’t feel entirely wrong. Walking the streets of Manhattan, or below ground, it’s strange not to see a plurality sporting headphones of some kind, likely connected to an Apple device, or at least to one inspired by the same. To a certain extent, the effect is to strand us in our own islands which, though tranquil, isolate us from some part of the day-to-day experience that’s defined Western civilization for a few centuries. For one, the random subway conversation is a stranger thing today than it was pre-iPod. In many cases that’s for the best, but it does contribute to obliterating those random, happy coincidences that can, in a rare moment of fate, come to define a life.

This is what we’ve lost in the iPod age, but set it against what we’ve gained. Portable connectivity is found time; a chance to listen to music from that girl you met (you know, at the thing), write a longer email that you may not otherwise have had time for, or catch up on missed reading. For my part, Jobs’ creations have let me read more, hear more, and communicate more — albeit with people I already know — adding depth that could otherwise have been lost. I learned to love This American Life by podcast, the New Yorker on iPad, and built (or rebuilt) friendships, largely over Gchat and iPhone, based on shared experiences from both. It’s not for nothing that (according to one study) iDevices stimulate the part of the brain normally reserved for relationships: Jobs’ gadgets are, for much of our lives, the effective portal to those relationships. Whose heart hasn’t skipped a beat at the white bubble of a text message from just That Girl (or guy)? In the modern world, we may fall in love over Gchat, text, or FaceTime, thanks to slicker connectivity. It’s not even unusual.

Jobs’ legacy is a way of designing technology that adds charisma to the routine, unlocks new capabilities, and redefines the modern life. As with grander technologies, our challenge is to use it to (on balance) add to the human experience, rather than lose ourselves in it. And to Jobs’ credit, that’s a goal he wholeheartedly endorsed, and ensured was reflected in his work.

(This post written on an iPhone, on the subway, and with a title referencing one such song.)

iPhone Metaphysics

Today wound up being fairly busy, so in lieu of something more political, I encourage those of you with iPhones to take this common error screen as life advice. Our past mistakes made us who we are today so, there’s nothing to undo. Alternately, live life well, so that there’s nothing to undo. Sage little devices, these.

Sick Day Photos

Is it possible to be allergic to fall? If not, I think I have a cold. So, in lieu of anything requiring complicated thought, of which I am certainly incapable today, enjoy this picture of graffiti found just north of Canal Street, which I take as a hipster reduction of Billy Joel’s “Tell Her About It.”

Of course, I guess it’s possible to read it as an exhortation to violence, rather than romance… but I like my interpretation better.

The Good Guys, and the Excuses We Make For Ignoring Them

Permit me to indulge in a bit of idealism.

I spent the close of last night reading Catching Fire, the sequel to The Hunger Games – and I’ll explain. It’s a series of young adult books that, like Harry Potter and Ender’s Game, made the crossover and gained some popularity among the older and wiser set. In the series, a totalitarian government centered in the Rockies replaced the United States, after large swaths of the world were wiped away in an unexplained cataclysm. 75 years prior to the events of the first book, the remaining American “states” — organized into 13 “districts,” each specialized to produce one type of good — rebelled, but were violently put down by the central government (think Firefly). To remind the districts of their subservience, and the ease with which the Capitol could crush them at any moment, every year each District must submit two children to participate in a deadly free-for-all game of survival, televised (naturally) for the enjoyment of the Capitol. In the districts, families eke out a living on starvation rations, but if their “tributes” win the game, for a solid year, everyone in the district gets enough food to eat. Hence, “the Hunger Games.”

Big damn heroes.

Not to spoil anything — I mean, since there’re sequels, you probably figured this out anyways — but the main character survives book one. (Gasp!) As part of her victory, she’s treated to a tour of all 12 districts, culminating in a celebration in the Capitol, where names (and customs) are drawn from the worst stories of the excesses of ancient Rome. One excerpt:

All that I can think of is the emaciated bodies of the children on our kitchen table as my mother prescribes what the parents can’t give. More food. Now that we’re rich, she’ll send some home with them. But often in the old days, there was nothing to give and the child was past saving, anyway. And here in the Capitol they’re vomiting for the pleasure of filling their bellies again and again. Not from some illness of body or mind, not from spoiled food. It’s what everyone does at a party. Expected. Part of the fun.

At a cultural level, we know to recoil from the tragic juxtaposition between the life of the haves, and the death of the have-nots. How can anyone justify such decadence, when across the country, children starve to death? The same reaction and innate sense of justice pervade other fictional universes. Robin Hood is a thief, but we know he’s doing the right thing. Firefly‘s Mal Reynolds notes the contrast between Paradiso — where everyone dies young thanks to a futuristic, hyper-virulent black lung — and the opulent core worlds, where disease functionally ended years prior, and we’re instantly on his side. But our sense of justice seems to stop sometimes at the TV set, or at the covers of a book. Why?

Why don’t we have the same reaction in our own lives? We know we prefer a world where the rich-poor gap is much smaller than it actually is; and we know, too, that we underestimate the actual state of income disparity in this country (pdf). Almost everyone agrees that America is less equal than it should be, and that it’s getting worse. But we still entertain politicians who insist that under absolutely no circumstance should the rich carry a heavier burden in the course of restoring the country’s economic stability. Instead, it’s actually a mainstream position that hey, maybe the poor, those “lucky duckies,” should kick in a bit more?

We know this is wrong. Poll after poll shows support for a millionaire’s tax bracket. But we don’t stick by it. Maybe it’ll be different this time — maybe Obama will stick by his veto threat — but I’m no longer optimistic.

Let’s Stop Reliving It

This weekend, expect to be deluged by a sea of violent images: the towers burning, falling, the planes impacting, and probably a series of images even more disturbing, which I won’t link to or even name. We’ll agonize over rumors, look over our shoulders, and in many respects maintain the last decade’s focus on the past, and on loss.

It’s time to put all that aside. We can’t deny that the nation  suffered that day almost ten years ago; nor the little, routinized tragedies that followed on its coat-tails. But it’s long past time to put this decade in perspective, and put it away. In many ways, we’ve let ourselves get distracted from our mission as a nation, and lost track of our priorities. Our initial, hyperpartisan reaction — the real legacy of 9/12 and the ensuing week, and one that continues still in novel forms — converted a tragedy that could’ve bound us together into one that has torn us apart.

Time to move on. The America that killed Osama Bin Laden should also be the America that killed his dream, and finally bound up the wounds we let him open. We’ve survived in form, but now it’s time to survive in substance. Put away the disaster porn and the bloody shirt, question the measures we’ve claimed were necessary for a “post-9/11″ world, and substitute Tony Blair’s reminder of the vital importance of wartime multiculturalism for our own (e.g.). Make this Saturday more like Pearl Harbor Day — we were hurt, we fought back, we won, we remained ourselves. This last item, especially, will be cause to celebrate.

Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Church?

Continuing the trend of “fighting back against characterizations they’re actually proud of,” the National Review explains why modern, politicized Christian fundamentalism is not an exclusionary worldview to be feared, but a simple attempt to prevent mean-spirited liberals from ejecting Christianity from the marketplace of ideas.”It’s easy to forget,” moans David French,

…that just a generation or two ago, there was a real question about whether Christian student groups even had a right to meet in public schools or on public university campuses. It’s also easy to forget that America was and is a beacon of religious liberty in the world, and we should never allow the ignorance and prejudices of, among others, the secular Left (especially when manifested through government action) drive religion from the public square.

Well, yes but no. Christians have always had the right to meet but not necessarily the right to claim public funding for their meetings at public schools. It took a series of poorly-reasoned Supreme Court decisions to give them that.

What’s missing here is an understanding that Christianity wasn’t “drive[n] from the public sphere” by obnoxious, hateful liberals bent on suppressing private Christian expression. It was “driven” from the government’s rostra, and denied the government’s imprimatur of approval out of a decent respect for the First Amendment, as any religion would be.

That’s as it should be. The First Amendment doesn’t somehow exempt popular religions, nor does it make exceptions based on America’s long history with Christianity. “Liberals” have never singled Christianity out: they’ve merely asked it to follow the same rules that apply to ever other religion.

But that’s where mainstream Americans and Christian fundamentalists part company, and what makes politicians like Bachmann, Perry, and their modern fundamentalist peers stand out in a crowd. We all grant — and right-wing bogeymen like the ACLU even regularly fight to defend — the right to private worship. But for fundamentalists, that’s not enough. They don’t want private prayer at public schools (which remains legal — how could it be otherwise?). They want school-led prayer at public schools. The “return to the public square” that fundamentalists so modestly seek is nothing so much as a return to state-financed religious dominance of the culture.

Ah. I’m more concerned with acknowledging this threat than with naming it. “Dominionism,” a term popularized by a spate powerful articles detailing the philosophical excesses of one Michele Bachmann, is helpful. So is Andrew Sullivan’s term,  ”Christianism” — though unfortunate for its introduction of another fabricated -ism to a world already crowded with them. I’d prefer to stick with fundamentalism.

Cultural Leadership

Rick Warren, the halfway-liberal evangelist briefly involved in the President’s inauguration, offers two tweets on cultural leadership, for those who believe the task can (and should) be undertaken:

Politics is always downstream from the source of culture. By the time a law is proposed, the water’s already contaminated.

If you’re serious about changing culture, start with music. Its power is unequalled. That’s why I mentor musicians.

I read these together, as a syllogism, which I think is probably correct:

(1) If your goal is to influence national politics, (2) remember that culture is prior to, and more powerful than, politics. (3) Therefore, to change politics, one must change culture.

The law rarely leads. In most cases — like in desegregation — it lags far behind, waiting for the ascendancy of a newer and more progressive generation to write their lifestyle and beliefs into law. And when the law leads, even if it effects cultural change, it rarely prompts the kind of consensus that results from organic development. To that extent, the preacher is on to something, but for one serious problem: I don’t think it’s possible to affirmatively lead the culture in the top-down manner he assumes. Put another way, I don’t think one can countermand organic cultural change through the counseling of individual players, or even through aggressive activism.

This is the flawed background assumption of the “culture wars”: that leaders, or groups largely disconnected from the dominant popular culture, can arrest the pace of its change. To my knowledge, it’s simply never happened in human history — and certainly not in a free society — but for whatever reason, it’s still an act played out in every generation, the culture going in one direction, and some remnant of the old guard attempting to “stand[] athwart history” yelling “Stop!” Maybe the background culture comes from a more genuine place; maybe, as an amalgamation of multiple influences, it’s less susceptible to voices narrowly focused on a single theme.

Whatever the reason, I don’t believe that cultural conservatism, as an ideology, has ever won a battle, despite hewing to Warren’s playbook. Rome hellenized despite the Catos, and was later Christianized despite Julian & his elites; the Catholic church lost its temporal influence despite the Papacy; the Beatles drowned out Cole Porter; the South desegregated despite Thurmond & Helms; and America will come to accept gay marriage despite her Santorums. Who’s to say whether it’s good or bad, but it is the course of history. “Politics is always downstream from the source of culture,” and the current’s too swift to paddle backwards.

The View from Wall St. & Water

I asked them how long they were going to stick around: apparently, until the current moves them away.