Well, just as I’ve finally managed to post something of substance, it seems July is over. And I’m about to commence moving from New South Wales to Arizona, so posting at debitage will be light for the next couple weeks (thus probably losing me any increased readership I might have gained from my stint here on Alas). Huge thanks to Amp for allowing me to prattle on in this space for the past month. See you in the comments section.
The proposal for a national nuclear waste repository at Yucca Mountain is back in the news, as the Department of Energy moves forward with plans, people turn their attention to nuclear power as an alternative to increasingly expensive oil, and a proposal to make Nevada the second contest of the 2008 Democratic presidential primary gains steam. I don’t have a strong view about the substantive merits of centralized versus dispersed storage of nuclear waste, or the suitability of the Yucca Mountain site on engineering grounds. What I do have an opinion on is whether the current approach to establishing a centralized repository at that site is a good one.
To some degree, the dispute over Yucca Mountain is a technical dispute over what the real level of risk is. But it also goes deeper, so that purely technical debate about milirems and geological stability will not resolve the issue. The deeper dispute arises from the fact that there are two ways of looking at what makes a risk acceptable, which I’ll call the “economic paradigm” and the “social paradigm.” Each paradigm can be treated as a descriptive theory (how actual people actually do think about risks) or as a normative theory (how people should think about risks).
I’m a pretty sorry excuse for a blogger, since I’m only just now getting around to commenting on a much-blogged article by Daniel Gilbert about climate change. Gilbert argues that people aren’t concerned about climate change, because people all have certain evolved cognitive biases.
The problem is that it’s not “people” who are unconcerned about climate change, because many people are concerned. Any psychologically worthwhile theory of risk perception must be able to recognize the diversity of views and account for both the skeptics and the alarmists.
David Barash thinks that creating human-ape hybrids would be a great way to strike a blow for truth and reason. His main motivation is to disprove creationism — though how designing a new creature will prove evolution escapes me. More interesting to me was his secondary claim that such hybrids would also promote a stronger environmental ethic:
This is one of the world’s comparatively minor injustices, but nevertheless one that it’s useful to be reminded of from time to time, since there’s no excuse for it: Residents of Washington, DC have no representation in Congress. All they have is a non-voting delegate in the House (though since 1961 they have had three electoral votes for President).
At a bare minimum, DC needs a Representative with status equal to that of the other Reps. The Senate is a bit tougher of a question, since I think the two-Senators-per-state system is wrong (I’d rather change the Senate to nationwide Proportional Representation, in which DC would of course vote). So I’m undecided between giving DC two Senators of its own, or the alternative (and more politically feasible) suggestion of letting it vote in the Maryland Senate elections. Indeed, I would be happy to retrocede DC back into Maryland, just like Arlington long ago returned to Virginia.
There are two basic arguments advanced against giving DC representation: the “vested interest” argument and the “non-favoritism” argument. I don’t think either holds water, particularly when matched up against the competing claims of political equality for all citizens.
I guess you have to give John Howard credit for being honest. The Aussie PM is excited about the prospect of Australia becoming an “energy superpower” by expanding its share of the fossil fuel market. Howard rejects not only the Kyoto Protocol but also any alternative (such as a carbon tax) other than end-of-the-pipe carbon cleanup technology. Burning fossil fuels comes first, because that’s what will make Australia rich. Protecting the environment can’t be allowed to interfere.
Australia is well placed to be an innovator in clean energy, with its cloudless skies and wide-open spaces ready for solar and wind power. But those kind of innovations won’t make money right away for established mining companies, and Howard is clear on whose back he’s watching.
Howard repeatedly cites “pragmatism” as a reason to focus on older forms of energy. It’s a common rhetorical trick, portraying older energy technologies as known quantities while renewable energy is speculative and risky. The problem is, if we demand that our energy source be clean — which Howard gives lip service to — the plausibility of that claim goes out the window. Is it really “pragmatic” to aim for a massive engineering fix that will turn dirty energy technologies into clean ones, but not “pragmatic” to expand the use of already-existing technologies that are intrinsically clean?
Cross-posted at debitage
Over at Pandagon, there’s a good discussion of whether “alpha males” — men who strongly exhibit stereotypically masculine characteristics, like assertiveness, self-control, extroversion, leadership, risk-taking, not-taking-shit-from-anyone — can be (pro)feminists. The conclusion, with which I agree, seems to be a unanimous “yes.” (I will note, in a probably futile attempt to forestall semantic debate, that I realize that the alpha and beta categories are generalized and fuzzy and not mutually exclusive. In any event, we can talk about the alpha-male characteristics without necessarily packaging them under that term.)
What interests me is the implication that whether beta males (unassuming, conciliatory, tolerant, behind-the-scenes, risk-averse) can be (pro)feminist is unproblematic. The issue is raised by, and hence focuses on, alpha males, who are trying to do away with the particular patriarchal expressions of alpha maleness in their lives. Confusion between these two levels — and hence improper generalization of feminists’ criticisms of patriarchal forms of alpha maleness into criticism of alpha maleness tout court — seems to be the core of the problem. Anti-feminists often make this implication explicit, when they charge that feminism wants to turn all men into beta-males, and cite the inevitability of alpha males as a reason why feminism will never succeed.
Looking at the feminist and (pro)feminist responses to the alpha male question, though, it seems that it’s alpha male (pro)feminists whose existence is unproblematic. Indeed, the paradigm case of (pro)feminist action — boldly calling out another man on his sexist behavior — is also a classically alpha male act. So perhaps we should be asking whether it’s possible for beta males to be (pro)feminists.
I must make clear that there’s one jump of logic I’m not willing to make yet. It would be easy enough to end this post by saying “pity the poor beta male, who is left out of (pro)feminism! We must reassure him that he’s OK, that he can be (pro)feminist in his own way.” (A very beta-male sort of argument, incidentally.) Instead we need to entertain the possibility that a certain degree of alpha maleness is a requirement for being a (pro)feminist, at least in a world where injustice and privilege must be actively fought, and where men have no mitigating circumstances or excuses.
Cross-posted at debitage
In the comments to a recent post, Jenn asks:
And I’m still curious to know how many animal rights activsts refuse medical treatment for themselves or someone they love based on its history in animal experimentation?
I have no idea what actual animal rights activists think about this question (speak up in the comments if you’re an animal rights activist reading this). I can only speak for myself — and as animal rights activists go, I’m a pretty sorry excuse for one, since I still occasionally eat meat when traveling or visiting. Nevertheless, I don’t think it’s necessarily hypocritical for someone committed to animal rights to accept the use of a medical treatment whose development required animal experimentation.
Let’s go back to writing about something I actually know something about.
The headlines say climate change causes wildfires. And indeed, a new study (pdf) found a strong correlation between the increase during the 1980s in the number and length of wildfires in the western US and increased temperatures.
But before we rush off to base our wildfire policy on these findings, two grains of salt are in order: 1) explaining a phenomenon is not the same as explaining the problem associated with that phenomenon, and 2) the solution to a problem is not simply the cause applied in reverse. This post will deal only with the first issue, hopefully I’ll be able to post on the second tomorrow.
In describing his efforts at recognizing privilege and becoming a better (pro)feminist, Malachi at Feminist Allies writes:
A major part of the problem is that I *do* have a lot (some say an excess) of self-confidence, a forceful personality, and some take-charge instincts. Thanks, patriarchy. But disentangling what’s really me form what’s the patriarchy’s influence, what’s self-confidence and what’s self-aggrandizement, what’s inspiring leadership and what’s privileged domination is no mean feat.
What interests me about this bit is the implied distinction between the “real” self and the constructed self, which is a common one in thinking about the effects of oppression systems on individuals. The model here is that there’s some inherent pre-social and morally neutral real personality. Then patriarchy came along and added some stuff on top of that, stuff that is bad because it leads to harming others. Malachi’s task is then to strip away this fake addition to reveal the real egalitarian person underneath.
I mentioned this in a comment to Amp’s post about the “ad hominem defense,” but then I decided it was worth a full post. An ad homiem defense is when a liberal rattles off their lefty credentials in response to some specific criticism from the left (or mutatis mutandis for any other ideology). There’s a particularly egregious example at the end of this Hank Fox post. Fox came in for a lot of criticism for saying that he wouldn’t eat at an Arby’s where one of the employees had a facial piercing, because he finds piercings disgusting. (In the linked post, he tries to defend himself by claiming that his problem is that people with piercings care too much about what others think, as if the clean-cut and wholesome look isn’t just as much a show put on for others, and as if his vocal boycott of Arby’s isn’t essentially a demand that other people should care what others think about their appearance.) After his painfully self-righteous rationalization, Fox hauls out his liberal bona fides to prove that his anti-piercing views couldn’t possibly be a case of bigotry.
Fox’s post is interesting to me because it makes so clear one important element of the ad hominem defense: its use of the Us vs Them frame. He asks us to imagine a room full of people, and reminds us that if Rush Limbaugh and his ilk were on one side of the room, he and his critics would end up together on the opposite side. This is a vision of politics in which there are only two camps. Criticism may only be made against the other camp. If someone’s liberal enough to get into the liberal camp, then they’re one of Us. If you criticize someone, you must be implicitly seeing them as one of Them, an enemy on the same level as Rush. The choice is between total solidarity and total animosity. The only debate is over where to draw the line — to we, like the users of the ad hominem defense, draw a magnanimously wide tent in order to focus on our real enemies on the far right? Or do we, as ad-hom-defenders’ critics are assumed to, draw the line narrowly to include only a pure in-group on the “Us” side?
But of course this is not how politics works. So far as I know, nobody who criticised Fox’s views of pierced people thinks that he’s therefore wholly in Rush Limbaugh’s camp. As I said to Hugo Schwyzer a while back,
… a person’s membership in the cause is never all-or-nothing. Your sins don’t wipe out the other good work you’ve done, but the other good work you’ve done doesn’t earn you indulgences.
I think the mentality behind the ad hominem defense goes some way toward explaining why white people are reluctant to engage in deep discussions of race (and men in discussions of feminism, etc.) — and I don’t claim that I’m immune to this. There’s a fear of discovering that while you thought you were one of Us, you are actually one of Them. It’s easier to pretend that race doesn’t exist than to risk feeling lumped in with the KKK because you said or did something racially insensitive. Strategies like the “don’t you have bigger fish to fry” argument that Amp discussed serve to keep the fundamental line between Us and Them in a comfortable spot. (Note that this is a problem with the assumptions privileged people make, not with anything that their critics are doing.)
Cross-posted at debitage
John McGrath makes an offhand remark citing Hurricane Katrina as evidence that Bush’s climate change policies have led to disaster (analogous to the way his WMD policy led to the disaster in Iraq). I agree that Bush’s policies on climate change are deplorable, and that Bush’s deplorable policies bear a fair bit of responsibility for the Katrina disaster. But the share of the Bush-blame that can be attributed specifically to his action on climate change is very small. Climatologists remain divided on the question of how much climate change will alter the frequency of severe weather events, and how much of that alteration is already visible.
Blaming Katrina on Bush’s climate change policies may be politically convenient as a way of generating pressure to change those policies. But it’s politically inconvenient in a broader sense, because it reinforces the “natural disaster” frame for understanding what went wrong with Katrina (and what continues to go wrong in many other hazard events).
The “natural disaster” frame envisions society as moving along innocently, minding its own business, when wham! it gets hit by an extreme geophysical event that causes destruction and death. Causal responsibility, and hence blame, lie on the side of the geophysical event. So therefore interventions to prevent or mitigate disasters focus on controlling the event, a “hazard-side” strategy.
Over half a century ago Gilbert White — the father of natural hazards research, and hardly a political radical — pointed out that “natural disasters” are actually the result of the intersection of natural and social conditions. Whether there is a disaster, and what kind of damage it does, depends on how social practices and individual choices put human values at risk of being undercut by changes in the natural environment. Later more radical thinkers elaborated the idea of “vulnerability,” with the slogan “there’s no such thing as a [purely] natural disaster.” We have to focus on the reasons why humans become vulnerable to extreme geophysical events.
Framing Bush’s responsibility for Katrina as a matter of his climate change policy places our focus on the hazard event. The problem becomes the fact that there was a Category 5 hurricane, and the change we need is to control greenhouse gas emissions so as not to increase the frequency of Category 5 hurricanes. This focus ignores the central role in the disaster played by New Orleanians’ (and our whole economy’s) vulnerability to hurricanes. This vulnerability is the product of an economic system dependent on oil and the creation of economic inequalities, a system of racial oppression, and a hubristic attitude to the environment. Across a broad range of issues, Bush’s policies have served to maintain this system (though he is of course far from the sole creator or sustainer of it).
The “blame climate change” redirection of attention is especially unfortunate given that the sources of vulnerability in the case of Katrina are so fundamental to what’s wrong in so many other facets of modern America. Big events like natural disasters are powerful political-rhetorical resources. They need to be used wisely, to cut at the most fundamental problems.
Cross-posted at debitage
Hi there. This is Stentor Danielson, best known on the web as the author of debitage, the top Google result for both “utilitarian view of homosexuality” and “deontological view of homosexuality.” I’m a heterosexual white middle-class non-disabled cissexual unitarian male. I was born and raised in Pennsylvania, but I’m currently living in Richmond, NSW, Australia while working on my PhD dissertation, “Discourses About Wildfire in New Jersey and New South Wales.”
I’m honored and just a bit intimidated to be given such a large podium (debitage averages 30 readers a day), but I’ll try to make the most of my time here. I write about things across the spectrum of progressive politics, but my main focus is the environment. I’ve got some ideas about what I want to write this month, but I’m quite open to suggestions.
