2013

Exhibit in the Dinosphere at the Children’s Museum, Indianapolis

We make promises to one another. And one of the promises we’ve made is to roll up our sleeves and do world community work. The kind of work that leads to liberty and justice and peace, not just for some people, but for all people. That’s not a wishy-washy faith. That’s a faith that requires some courage. The courage to avoid cynicism. The courage to continue to have hope. So my question to you is this: Are you in?

My friend Andy Burnette, in a sermon (“Peace, Liberty, and Justice for All“) discussing the sixth principle of Unitarian Universalism.

In discussing the revolutionary power of capitalism (its “creative destruction“), Marx says:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations. It has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors”, and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. It has resolved personal worth into exchange value, and in place of the numberless indefeasible chartered freedoms, has set up that single, unconscionable freedom — Free Trade. In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation.

…

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form, was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes. Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

Referring to this passage, John Gray notes the irony of conservatives promoting both capitalism and the the “traditional family”:

The programs of “free market conservatives,” who aim to dismantle regulatory restraints on the workings of market forces while conserving or restoring traditional patterns of family life and social order, depend on the assumption that the impact of the market can be confined to the economy. Observing that free markets destroy and create forms of social life as they make and unmake products and industries, Marx showed that this assumption is badly mistaken. Contrary to what he expected, nationalism and religion have not faded away and there is no sign of their doing so in the foreseeable future; but when he perceived how capitalism was undermining bourgeois life, he grasped a vital truth.

Background check legislation would not have created a gun registry.

Obama has said that the background check legislation defeated in the Senate yesterday would not create a gun registy, which is the fear of many who oppose it. Even Ted Cruz, darling of the right wing, admits that it doesn’t, though he qualifies that with a slippery slope argument.

I was looking for proof so I started digging into the text of the bill itself. Obama’s claim seems straightforwardly true, though of course I’m not a lawyer and I have no formal training in interpreting laws.

The text of the bill was posted by Sen. Toomey (co-author with Sen. Machin) on his website. A national gun registry is already illegal. The background check legislation explicitly reaffirms that in the follow section:

(c) Prohibition of National Gun Registry.-Section 923 of title 18, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following:
“(m) The Attorney General may not consolidate or centralize the records of the-
“(1) acquisition or disposition of firearms, or any portion thereof, maintained by-
“(A) a person with a valid, current license under this chapter;
“(B) an unlicensed transferor under section 922(t); or
“(2) possession or ownership of a firearm, maintained by any medical or health insurance entity.

In the penalties section, the following is to be added to section 924 of title 18:

“(q) Improper Use of Storage of Records.-Any person who knowingly violates section 923(m) shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 15 years, or both.”.

923(m) is the section created by the text in the first blockquote. So the Attoney General is specifically prohibited from maintaining records of the information created by the background check process. Violation of that prohibition could lead to a fine and/or a 15 year prison sentence. It is already required under 922(t)(2) that the records created by the background check are destroyed:

(2) If receipt of a firearm would not violate subsection (g) or (n) or State law, the system shall—
(A) assign a unique identification number to the transfer;
(B) provide the licensee with the number; and
(C) destroy all records of the system with respect to the call (other than the identifying number and the date the number was assigned) and all records of the system relating to the person or the transfer.

Not only would it continue to be illegal for the Attorney General to create a gun registry, the background check legislation would have more strictly delimited the powers of the AG to seize records. It is already permitted under federal law (923(g)) for the AG to seize records kept by gun sellers in the course of an investigation. Outside those circumstances, however, sellers are not required to turn them over to the AG:

Each licensed importer, licensed manufacturer, and licensed dealer shall maintain such records of importation, production, shipment, receipt, sale, or other disposition of firearms at his place of business for such period, and in such form, as the Attorney General may by regulations prescribe. Such importers, manufacturers, and dealers shall not be required to submit to the Attorney General reports and information with respect to such records and the contents thereof, except as expressly required by this section. (923(g)(1)(A))

The “except as expressly required” refers to the AG’s power to seize records in the course of an investigation.

The background check legislation would have strengthened (it seems to me) the prohibition against seizing any records apart from those necessary for the investigation. It goes from stating that this section

shall not be construed as authorizing the Attorney General to seize any records or other documents other than those records or documents constituting material evidence of a violation of law

to stating

the Attorney General shall be prohibited from seizing any records or other documents in the course of an inspection or examination authorized by this paragraph other than those records or documents constituting material evidence of a violation of law.

I can only conclude, then, that Obama was right to say that those who have tried to raise the specter of a gun registry are misrepresenting it.

“A truly curious mind”

In a recent blog post Ta-Nehisi Coates says that one of the problems with the supposedly necessary “conversation on race” is that “it presumes that ‘America’ has something intelligent to say about race.” We cannot have a fruitful conversation, he says, while we remain in such ignorance. He’s writing in the context of the Brad Paisley/LL Cool J song “Accidental Racist”. He says that Paisley should have sought out artists who challenged his worldview. But such an act would have required

a mind interested in something more than being told what it already knows. It would require an artist doing his job and exploring. It would require truly engaging a community, instead of haughtily lecturing it on how, precisely, it should react to great pain. It would require something more than mere reification. It would require something more than absolution. It would require talking to people who may not like you. It would require the rarest of things in this space where everyone wants to write, but no one wants to read–a truly curious mind.

That last line has lingered in my mind ever since I read it last week. It also confirms one of my reading goals for this year: to read more non-Straight White American Male writers. Or, to put it another way, to read books by people who are not of the majority or dominant culture.

Recently, some contrarians (of both left and right) have complained about being asked to check their privilege**. I couldn’t be less interested in the details of these spats. But I do want to say that the idea of privilege awareness has been invaluable to me. As one of the aforementioned SWAMs – and a small-town Midwestern SWAM at that – I have been blind to the privileges I enjoy. And I expect to discover that I remain blind in many important ways.

This realization was what led me to the resolution to read more non-SWAM writers, both online and off. I don’t doubt that certain manifestations of privilege talk have been unhelpful. The idea behind it, however, has been incredibly helpful to me by inspiring me to turn my mind – already curious in many ways – further afield.

—

** See here for an explanation of the concept. See here for Peggy McIntosh’s classic essay on white privilege. It was one of my first and most important encounters with the concept.

My letter to the editor about Indiana’s SB 373, the ag-gag bill

I submitted the following to my local newspaper. Indiana residents: if you agree please contact your state senator and ask them to oppose this bill.

Undercover investigations of large farms (sometimes called “factory farms”) have proven invaluable in exposing cruel and inhumane practices. These investigations have increased awareness and sparked outrage among consumers, who have been allowed for the first time to witness the practices that bring animal products to their dinner table.

Practices such as the use of battery cages which confine hens in spaces so small that they cannot stretch their wings. Under these conditions the hens are subject to high levels of stress and injury, which they express through increased aggression. But rather than changing the conditions (which would decrease profits), the producers debeak the hens with a hot blade, without anesthetic. Male chicks, which are useless to egg producers, are thrown alive into grinders or otherwise neglected until they die.

Senate Bill 373 would outlaw these investigations, imposing penalties on anyone who photographs or records an agricultural operation without the owner’s consent. This not only strikes at the heart of investigative journalism, it is clearly an attempt by the industry to protect itself from public scrutiny.

Senator Brent Steele has already voted in favor of this legislation in committee. Please contact him and urge him to change his vote when it appears before the full Senate.

Are variations among humans “unnatural”?

Before Darwin, when species were thought to be immutable, naturalists believed that membership in a species was determined by whether the organism possessed the qualities that defined the essence of the species. For the pre-Darwinian naturalist, variations were of little interest, except as curiosities. It was, after all, the “standard” specimen that exemplified the external essence of the species, which the naturalist was trying to learn about. The essence was something real and determinate, fixed by nature itself, and the systems of classification devised by biologists were viewed as accurate or inaccurate depending on how well they corresponded to the fixed order of nature.

Evolutionary biology implies a very different view. Darwin argued that there are no fixed essences; there is only a multitude of organisms that resemble one another in some ways but differ in others. (Moreover, variations are no longer to be regarded as mere curiosities; on the contrary, they are the very stuff of nature – they are what make natural selection possible.) How those individuals are grouped – into species, varieties, and so on – is more or less arbitrary. In The Origin of the Species Darwin declared:

I look at the term species, as one arbitrarily given for the sake of convenience to a set of individuals closely resembling each other, and that it does not essentially differ from the term variety, which is given to less distinct and more fluctuating forms. The term variety again, in comparison with mere individual differences, is also applied arbitrarily, and for mere convenience sake.

Thus Darwinian biology substitutes individual organisms, with their profusion of similarities and differences, for the old idea of determinate species

(James Rachels, Created from Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism, p. 195)

The pre-Darwinian view of species, as described here, reminds me of Plato’s Forms: the idea that for every individual example of a thing, there exists a Form, an essence, to which it corresponds. Thus a particular dolphin is an instantiation of the form of dolphin; it is an example of dolphinness.

So the pre-Darwinians believed that each species had its own essential nature and identifying characteristics. It is why they so prized the perfect specimen; it was a tangible example of that species’ essential nature. Perhaps this idea was also undergirded by the doctrine of special creation, which states that each species was independently created by God at the beginning of time. In that case, then, each species literally had its perfect specimen, i.e., that first one created by God in the Garden of Eden.

Darwinian evolution calls all of this into question. The species were not created independently, but arose from a common ancestor. And far from being merely interesting errors, the process of speciation is actually driven by variations. While classification by species is obviously useful, it is not to be taken as an eternally valid catalog of creation.

If, then, species classification is a matter of organizational convenience and each species does not exist within impermeable barriers delineating its essential nature, then the idea of something being natural (i.e., according to its nature) becomes problematic. Naturalness seems to be rooted in pre-Darwinian ways of thinking, in which each creature is an instantiation of the essential Idea of that creature.

If species are clusters of characteristics then variations are perfectly “natural”. To put it another way, it is factually wrong to call these variations “unnatural”. Which leads me to quote Fr James Alison:

In the last fifty years or so we have undergone a genuine human discovery of the sort that we, the human race, don’t make all that often. A genuine anthropological discovery: one that is not a matter of fashion, or wishful thinking; not the result of a decline in morals or a collapse of family values. We now know something objectively true about humans that we didn’t know before: that there is a regularly occurring, non-pathological minority variant in the human condition, independent of culture, habitat, religion, education, or customs, which we currently call “being gay”. This minority variant is not, of course, lived in a way that is independent of culture, habitat, religion, education and customs. It is lived, as is every other human reality, in an entirely culture-laden way, which is one of the reasons why it has in the past been so easy to mistake it as merely a function of culture, psychology, religion or morality: something to get worked up about rather than something that is just there.

We still have a great deal to learn about this regularly occurring minority variant in the human condition. However we know enough about it now to recognise that it is something like a category mistake to talk about homosexuality, or heterosexuality for that matter, as though we were talking about a sort of desire. It seems to be closer to the mark to talk about these things as being particular configurations, a minority and a majority configuration, of the conditions of possibility of desire being human.

If we want to talk about what is or is not “natural”, then it seems clear that homosexuality is a perfectly natural variant within the human species. Those who would call it unnatural are, in many cases, operating within a pre-Darwinian understanding of nature.

And consider people who identify as genderqueer. The human species cannot be divided neatly into male and female; there are variations. This is precisely what we should expect given the evolutionary view of the world.

Now, of course, we must mind Hume’s Guillotine: we can’t make ethical statements about what ought to be based on scientific statements about what is. My point is simply that modern science makes judgments about “naturalness” problematic, especially when those judgments are made within an outdated conception of species.

When everything becomes a resource

In the final chapter of Animals Like Us, Mark Rowlands examines “the dialectic by which the instrumental view of animals becomes transformed into an instrumental view of human beings, and the unfortunate consequences this transformation yields.”

It all begins with big agribusiness. As with all other businesses, profit is king. In agribusiness this means bringing the meat or animal products to the market as quickly and cheaply as possible. Allowing them to roam would require an inefficient amount of space and a greater amount of food (the exercise would burn calories) – so they confine the animals. But this confinement leads to injury and disease, which necessitates the increased use of antibiotics. (Agribusiness now consumes 80% of all antibiotics.) Growth hormones are also introduced in order to get the animal to slaughter weight more quickly. And to keep feed costs down, the animals are fed with the cheapest food available, meaning they eat things they normally would never eat, e.g., the flesh of their own species. Each step creates further problems requiring new solutions, leading to further problems, etc.

The “get big or get out” mentality of agribusiness leads to the elimination of small and traditional farmers. The big factory farms run at peak capacity, leading to overproduction of meat products and dropping prices. Only the big farms can survive the falling prices. Also, tax law and regulations are designed to favor agribusiness and large farms. (Money buys lobbyists, legislators, and regulatory agency posts.) Small and traditional farmers are forced out of business while the big farms, the factory farms, the farms in thrall to Big Ag, survive.

This also has an effect on the environment. Factory farms produce an immense amount of waste which cannot be fully absorbed by the land. The excess waste then runs off into rivers and ground water. Animals, especially cattle, are inefficient converters of vegetable protein into animal protein. The land used to raise animals could be used far more efficiently to raise vegetables; but because of the demand for beef, more and more land (including vast swaths of rainforest) is being cleared. The whole process requires an increased use of fossil fuels. This combined with the land-clearing leads to an increased production/decreased offset of greenhouse gases which cause climate change.

Consumers also feel the impact. Heart attacks and cancer – the major health risks Americans face – can be linked back to increased consumption of animal products. We eat more animal products because there are more animal products and because their price is artificially deflated due to tax breaks and the savings derived from the exploitation of the animals themselves. Big Ag leaders sit on public health panels and – surprise! – recommend that Americans eat more animal products.

Also worrisome are the chemicals being fed to the animals, which are then consumed by those who eat the animals. From the pesticides sprayed on animal feed to the growth hormones and antibiotics fed to the animals themselves, humans are ingesting large amounts of chemicals, some of which are known carcinogens, the rest of which may have unforeseen health effects. And the increased use of antibiotics is leading to an increasing number of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.

So what do we do about these self-inflicted health problems? We concoct more drugs to treat them: drugs that are first tested on animals. Two of the most commonly used toxicity tests are the Draize test and the LD-50 test. The Draize test is most commonly performed on rabbits or dogs. The animal is placed in a restraint that holds its head still while a test substance is dropped into their lower eyelid. The eyelid is held closed to allow for maximum impact. The animal will then be monitored for swelling, bleeding, irritation, etc., for the next several weeks.

The best you can hope for is to spend the next few weeks in various degrees of discomfort, with an irritated eye that you are prevented from scratching, but it is quite probable that you will spend those weeks in agony. In some cases, you might suffer total loss of vision due to serious injury to your cornea. Then, of course, the obvious denouement: you are killed.

LD-50 tests determine what dosage of the substance in question is required to kill 50% of the test subjects. Mice, for example, will be force fed the substance over the course of several weeks until the dosage lethal to 50% of the population is determined.

During this time, you will, in all likelihood, suffer many of the classical symptoms of poisoning, including vomiting, diarrhea, paralysis, convulsions, and internal bleeding. When half the members of your batch have died, the experiment has been deemed to reach a successful conclusion, and then you and the remaining half are killed.

Rowlands’ conclusion to the book is worth quoting in full:

We are literally killing ourselves, and killing each other. We foul our water, our air, and our food. The great killers of today – cancer and heart disease – are increasingly inflicted on us by the corporations that churn chemicals out into the air, our rivers and our groundwater, and by the food producers that pile our plates full with food high in fat and laced with poisonous chemical cocktails. Do we fight this? Do we rage against what is being done to us and to our world? On the contrary, our complicity in the dialectic is unquestionable. What are we in this great scheme of things? Acceptable losses. As long as not too many of us die, then our deaths are an acceptable trade-off for economic gain and material luxury. Environmental degradation on an unprecedented scale? Ditto. In the gestell everything is a resource – ourselves and our world included. Everything is up for grabs, anything can be traded off against anything else. And, in this process, a loss – whether human or environmental – that is not too great, and which procures something else that is valued more, is an acceptable one.

We are acceptable losses. Why don’t we do anything about it? Because, implicitly, we have come to understand and accept this fact. Not only do we understand other people as resources, this is also how we understand ourselves. This is the culmination of the resource-based view of the world; the logic of the gestell. We are simply one resource amongst others. Our position is hopeless, and we are, consequently, helpless. We are not responsible for what we do, and what we let others do to us, because we are just acceptable losses. Why should we pretend otherwise?

We are killing ourselves, and killing each other. If I were religiously inclined – which I am not – I would be tempted to describe these as our sins. And what do we do with sins? We get someone else to take our sins upon them. Whether they want to or not! Animals can suffer for us, not only for those things that have been thrust upon us, but also for those things we have brought upon ourselves. They suffer for our smoke-induced lung cancer, for our obesity-induced heart disease, for the sloppy and irresponsible way we have used antibiotics. We, their self-styled masters, are lazy and stupid and, above all, ungrateful. But that’s OK. If anything, these are just other sins, and someone, or something, else can be made to take our sins upon them, and suffer so that we might not have to. Jesus is, apparently, live and well, but somewhat unwilling this time around. He’s living as a Draize rabbit, an LD-50 mouse, a heroin monkey, and a smoking dog.

Darwin’s religious skepticism

Today is Charles Darwin’s birthday and, as usual, several articles about him and the impact of his discovery have been appearing. Two in particular have caught my attention.

First is a a blog post by David Henson, in which he says, “I suspect that the Christian faith will look back in gratitude on the in-breaking of evolution into human consciousness as one of the most significant and fruitful theological events from the modern, scientific age.”

Second is an interview with J. David Plains, who says of Darwin: “Today we’d probably call Darwin something of a seeker. You might say he’s something of a proto-None.”

After reading that second piece I thought I’d share some of James Rachels’ discussion (in Created From Animals: The Moral Implications of Darwinism) of Darwin’s religious skepticism. To be clear, this is Rachels’ account, not mine. I don’t have the sort of detailed knowledge required to evaluate it. I would be grateful, however, for the opinion of anyone who does.

As a young man, Darwin seriously considered entering the ministry. He would later recall, “I did not then in the least doubt the strict and literal truth of every word in the Bible.” He thought he could follow the example of several other Church of England ministers and become an amateur naturalist. Eventually, though, his desire to make a name for himself as a scientist eclipsed all other considerations.

He would never again return to that youthful confidence. Early in their marriage, his devoutly Christian wife Emma began to detect Darwin’s growing doubts. She told him about her concerns in a letter and asked him to reconsider the direction he was taking. After his death that letter was found among his papers with a note written in the margin: “When I am dead, know that many times I have kissed and cried over this.”

As much as it pained him, he could not share her faith. He later wrote in his autobiography, “Disbelief crept over me at a very slow rate, but was at last complete. The rate was so slow that I felt no distress, and have never since doubted even for a single second that my conclusion was correct.”

He wrote his autobiography for his friends and family and therefore felt free to be unusually forthright about his opinion of Christianity.¹ He said that the Bible is contradictory and that the reports of miracles are not credible. He appealed to the diversity of religions: Other religions have sacred writings and religious experiences that they believe demonstrate the truthfulness of their religion. Why should we believe Christianity over them?

He also believed that some Christian doctrines were morally repugnant. Hell, for example:

I can indeed hardly see how anyone ought to with Christianity to be true; for if so the plain language of the text seems to show that the men who do not believe, and this would include my Father, Brother and almost all my best friends, will be everlastingly punished.

And this is a damnable doctrine.

He knew, of course, that a more “enlightened theism” could solve some of these problems. The problem of evil, however, continued to be a major reason for his inability to embrace theism.² On the other hand, he was drawn to the idea of God as the first cause. In a letter to Asa Gray, a devout Christian and defender of Darwin’s discovery, he said:

I had no intention to write atheistically. But I own that I cannot see as plainly as others do, and as I should wish to do, evidence of design and beneficence on all sides of us. There seems to me too much misery in the world. I cannot persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly created the Ichneumonidae with the express intention of their feeding within the living bodies of Caterpillars, or that a cat should play with mice. Not believing in this, I see no necessity in the belief that the eye was expressly designed. On the other hand, I cannot anyhow be contented to view this wonderful universe, and especially the nature of man, to conclude that everything is the result of brute force. I am inclined to look at everything as resulting from designed laws, with the details, whether good or bad, left to the working out of what we may call chance. Not that this notion at all satisfies me. I feel most deeply that the whole subject is too profound for the human intellect. A dog might as well speculate on the mind of Newton. Let each man hope and believe what he can. Certainly I agree with you that my views are not necessarily atheistical.

This would become his standard line when asked about his religious beliefs. He could understand why someone could believe in God, even if he could not bring himself to that point. In another letter he described himself as an agnostic (a term coined by his friend and defender Thomas Huxley):

In my most extreme fluctuations I have never been an Atheist in the sense of denying the existence of God. I think that generally (and more and more as I grow older), but not always, that an Agnostic would be the more correct description of my state and mind.

“Let each man hope and believe what he can.” Happy 204th birthday, Charles Darwin.

^{1. Publicly, however, he did not discuss religion. His discovery of evolution by means of natural selection was controversial enough; he didn’t want to defend his (lack of) religious beliefs also. Besides, he didn’t think direct attacks upon religion were effective: “Though I am a strong advocate for free thought on all subjects, yet it appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly) that direct arguments against Christianity and Theism produce hardly any effect on the public; and freedom of thought is best promoted by the gradual illumination of men’s minds, which follows from the advancement of science. It has, therefore, been always my object to avoid writing on religion, and I have confined myself to science.”↩}
^{2. Not just the problem of suffering caused by humanity, but the suffering endemic to animal life: “There there is much suffering in the world no one disputes. Some have attempted to explain this in reference to man by imagining that it serves for his moral improvement. But the number of men in the world is as nothing compared with that of all other sentient beings, and these often suffer greatly without any moral improvement. A being so powerful and so full of knowledge as God who could create the universe, is to our finite minds omnipotent and omniscient, and it revolts our understanding to suppose that his benevolence is not unbounded, for what advantage can there be in the sufferings of millions of the lower animals throughout almost endless time?”↩}

Wending My Way