Book review: Whose Freedom?: The Battle Over America’s Most Important Idea by George Lakoff.
This book makes a few good points about what cognitive science tells us about differing concepts associated with the word freedom. But most of the book consists of attempts to explain his opponents’ world view that amount to defending his world view by stereotyping his opponents as simplistic.
Even when I agree that the people he’s criticizing are making mistakes due to framing errors, I find his analysis very implausible. E.g. he explains Bush’s rationalization of Iraqi deaths as “Those killed and maimed don’t count, since they are outside the war frame. Moreover, Bush has done nothing via direct causation to harm any Iraqis and so has not imposed on their freedom”. Anyone who bothers to listen to Bush can see a much less stupid rationalization – Bush imagines we’re in a rerun of World War II, where the Forces of Evil have made it inevitable that some innocent people will die, and keeping U.S. hands clean will allow Evil to spread.
Lakoff’s insistence that his opponents are unable to understand indirect, systematic causation is ironic, since he shows no familiarity with most of the relevant science of complex effects of human action (e.g. economics, especially public choice economics).
He devotes only one sentence to what I regard as the biggest single difference between his worldview and his opponents’: his opponents believe in “Behavior as naturally governed by rewards and punishments.”
His use of the phrase “idea theft” to describe uses of the word freedom that differ from his use of that word is objectionable both due to the problems with treating ideas as property and with his false implication that his concept of freedom resembles the traditional U.S. concept of freedom (here’s an example of how he rejects important parts of the founders’ worldview: “One of the biggest mistakes of the Enlightenment was to counter this claim with the assumption that morality comes from reason. In fact, morality is grounded in empathy”).
If his claims of empathy are more than simply calling his opponents uncaring, then it may help explain his bias toward helping people who are most effective at communicating their emotions. For example, a minimum wage is part of his concept of freedom. People who have their wages increased by a minimum wage law tend to know who they are and often have labor unions to help spread their opinions. Whereas a person whom the minimum wage prevents from getting a job is less likely to see the cause or have a way to tell Lakoff about the resulting harm. (If you doubt the minimum wage causes unemployment, see http://www.nber.org/papers/w12663 for a recent survey of the evidence.)
This is symptomatic of the biggest problem with the book – he assumes political disagreements are the result of framing errors, not differences in understanding of how the world works, and wants to persuade people to frame issues his way rather than to use scientific methods when possible to better measure effects that people disagree about.
The book also contains a number of strange claims where it’s hard to tell whether Lakoff means what he says or is writing carelessly. E.g. “Whenever a case reaches a high court, it is because it does not clearly fit within the established categories of the law.” – I doubt he would deny that Hamdi v. Rumsfeld fit clearly within established habeas corpus law.
This is a book which will tempt people to believe that anyone who agrees with Lakoff’s policy advice is ignorant. But people who want to combat Lakoff’s ideology should resist that temptation to stereotype opponents. There are well-educated people (e.g. some behavioral economists) who have more serious arguments for many of the policies Lakoff recommends.
U.S. Politics
I’ve been wondering for a while whether I should blog about the net neutrality legislation that is being debated. At last, Brad Templeton has come up with a good analysis which covers much of what I wanted to say about why the belief that net neutrality is a good rule is not sufficient to tell us whether we should try to have that written into law.
Lessig’s book The Future of Ideas does a good job of explaining why net neutrality is a desirable rule – a commons can be a good thing, and net neutrality is a rule that’s important to keeping the internet functioning as a commons.
If we’re going to hope that legislation can be useful at protecting commons, then I suspect we need a concept of the commons that contains as much of a standardized bundle of rules as most versions of the concept of property rights contains. That way we could ask legislators to just apply this standardized bundle of rules to each new commons we want it to protect, without giving special interests much of a chance to write the details in such a way as to protect their special situation.
Unfortunately, I can’t think of a good set of rules which would be as intuitive as the rules which apply property rights to physical objects. I suspect that the best we can hope for is a set of rules like those describing what you own when you buy shares of corporate stock. We might even end up with rules as messy as those use for patents, in which case it’s unclear whether it would be worth the effort.
“I do not need to explain why I say things. That’s the interesting thing about being the president. Maybe somebody needs to explain to me why they say something, but I don’t feel I owe anybody an explanation,” – president George W. Bush (via Andrew Sullivan).
Next time you hear someone implying that commercial development is the primary enemy of the environment, remember stories such as this one about how much harm a single wasteful Army Corps of Engineers project is doing to wetlands.
Book Reviews: Sex Changes: The Politics of Transgenderism (Paperback)
by Pat Califia
and Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex by Pat Califia
Sex Changes provides a good history of nonstandard genders. It describes a rather dramatic change in how typical transsexuals see themselves, from a time when sex change operations were considered attempted cures for a somewhat embarrassing disease and strongly desired to fit in to a standard gender stereotype to a time when many celebrate their diversity and see their gender (both before and after any hormones or surgery they may get) as something different from male or female.
I was a bit surprised by some things the book reports, such as that cross-dressing was illegal in parts of the U.S. as recently as the 1980s, or that some people approach sex reassignment with the same mindset as they do when getting tattoos.
The book has fairly good discussions of the problems with access to surgery and hormones that are created by disagreements over whether they are cures for a disease or something closer to cosmetic surgery. It is disturbing how much incentive there is to lie to doctors (and maybe insurers) in order to fit a somewhat arbitrary stereotype of someone with more mental problems than the average transsexual experiences.
I’m disappointed that the book does little to analyze the politics of how gender-segregated restrooms deal with people who don’t consider themselves male or female. It seems likely that this will generate political controversy soon, but few people seem prepared for it.
The book mostly deals with U.S. culture, but one chapter deals unusually-gendered roles in other cultures, mainly Berdaches in Native American cultures, and arguments about whether they should be thought of as transgender roles.
I have a few objections to what the book says:
The roots of prejudice against homosexuals and the hatred and fear of transsexuals are so closely woven together that it is not really all that difficult to educate people simultaneously about both communities.
This seems only half right. There are ways to argue for queer rights that apply to both groups, but I don’t see how they address many of the fears of bigots. Prejudice against gays has little to do with the fears that restrooms will be unsafe for some women if there is no clear boundary between male and female, or the fear that someone will put a lot of time and prestige at risk courting a potential mate only to discover that it won’t be possible to produce children via such a mating. Fear of transsexuals has little to do with the fear that gay men will spread sexually transmitted diseases.
There are many things that could have been done better to advance respect for transsexuals without hindering homosexuals. We could have used the word queer a good deal more often, and we could have tried harder to insure that queer was used in an inclusive way. (The obstacles to that weren’t just conservative tendencies among some homosexuals, but also intolerance among radicals who want to show off their ideological purity by distancing themselves from non-radicals who could be called queer).
Another way would be for gay rights advocates to focus more on disagreements about whether the primary purpose of sex and romance is reproduction. Many leading gay marriage opponents are trying to maintain or recreate a culture in which sex is more strongly connected to reproduction than I think the swing voter is comfortable with. Yet too many gay rights activists prefer to stereotype opponents as simply ignorant rather than having controversial but coherent goals.
These two approaches could have helped transsexuals somewhat without any cost to gays, but much of the reason gays have been accepted faster than transsexuals is that there have been more gays around to demand respect from their friends and neighbors, and no change in queer activist strategies would have much effect on that difference.
despite the fact that SRS has been performed for three decades, most insurance companies and HMOs classify it as an experimental procedure, and will not cover it. This should be compared to the response to organ transplants
Yet there’s much clearer evidence that organ transplants usually accomplish their goals well than there is that sexual reassignment surgery does. Insurers treatment of SRS doesn’t seem significantly more arbitrary than their decision to not cover experimental treatments in general. The main problem is the inadequate innovation in the surgical practices.
Public Sex is a fairly good survey of unconventional sexual practices. Much of it simply reports that people (often the author) are proud to engage in this and that practice. The book occasionally makes arguments that attempt to convince people to approve of those practices, but mostly it will fail to change many minds. People who are unashamed of sex will mostly already agree with the ideas in the book, and prudes will be unwilling to consider them.
The rants against puritanical feminists might convince a few gays that some feminists are their enemies, but mostly they will just reinforce existing beliefs.
Many of the essays were written in the 1980s, and the sometimes tedious descriptions of legal and political details of that time are of little value except to historians.
Some of the older essays include an occasional annoyingly overbroad quasi-marxist class struggle rant, but the more recent essays indicate the author has become more sensible over time.
The rants against puritanical feminists might convince a few gays that some feminists are their enemies, but mostly they will just reinforce existing beliefs.
Many of the essays were written in the 1980s, and the sometimes tedious descriptions of legal and political details of that time are of little value except to historians.
Some of the older essays include an occasional annoyingly overbroad quasi-marxist class struggle rant, but the more recent essays indicate the author has become more sensible over time.
Ramesh Ponnuru, a somewhat respectable conservative, has published a book titled “The Party of Death: The Democrats, the Media, the Courts, and the Disregard for Human Life”.
I have nothing newsworthy to say about the claim that the Democrats are a party of death. What puzzles me is why Republicans think they should be considered opponents of a culture of death. I haven’t heard any leading Republicans criticize Leon Kass, who recently served as chair of the President’s Council on Bioethics under Bush, for statements such as:
the finitude of human life is a blessing for every individual, whether he knows it or not.
See this article for a longer version of his argument that people ought to die.
I wonder if what Ponnuru really means is that the Democrats are a party of unnatural death, whereas the Republicans are a party of natural death.
In Reason Magazine, James Bovard reports on some strange discrepancies in the media stories about Rigoberto Alpizar, who was killed by air marshals in December. It seems that the passengers in the plane said that Alpizar never claimed to have a bomb. Yet the majority of media reports seem to conclude that the air marshals acted correctly.
Why do the storytellers find this controversy much less entertaining than Cheney’s shooting accident?
The Bush administration’s abuse of innocent Muslims hasn’t been getting as much coverage as it deserves, so I’m encouraging you all to spread the word about this account of the government’s continuing abuse of Muslims that it admitted months ago were innocent (thanks to Andrew Sullivan).
What is Congress doing about this boost to Al Qaeda’s recruitment efforts? Trying to restrict the habeas corpus rights of the victims so that we don’t hear about them.
Monopolies tend to become insensitive bureaucracies, and governments tend to be some of the most monopolistic entities around. (If you think of monopolies as bad only because they get monopoly profits, or think other kinds of harm are avoidable given monopoly power, I recommend reading Lessig’s book The Future of Ideas : The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World). Democracy has sometimes been effective at reducing the extent to which governments have acted as monopolies, by creating competition between factions. In recent years, gerrymandering has virtually eliminated that competition for many legislative bodies.
California Proposition 77 would eliminate the conflicts of interest that make current gerrymandering a major threat to democracy, and would give us instead something that works more like our judicial system. Our judicial system isn’t ideal, but it’s better than what a legislature does when the voters are unable to influence the legislature.
Critics have complained that Prop 77 is imperfect, but haven’t provided a clear explanation of why the alleged imperfections could be considered large in comparison to the difference between the current gerrymandering and a competitive democracy, or why it would be harder to adopt improvements to Prop 77 later than it is to adopt it now.
For a while now I’ve been bothered by the absence of an eloquent phrase for monopolies on ideas that doesn’t perpetuate the recent claim that those monopolies deserve the same respect as ownership of physical objects. That claim has caused some presumptions which distort discussion of copyrights and patents, and lead to thoughtless conclusions such as this attack on Google’s Print Library (a project which sounds like it will respect copyrights more carefully than Google’s main search engine does).
Eric Drexler recently mentioned that “intellectual pseudo property” is an appropriate term, and pointed out that many of the rules it refers to are more like a lease than ownership. Apparently Markus Krummenacker used the phrase first (without a succinct argument that it should replace the phrase intellectual property).