Rational Philosophy

Clinton (Hillary), Polanski (Roman), Young Earth (In Texas), and red wine.

The Times reports that ‘Hillary Rosen, one of Mrs. Clinton’s most prominent women supporters, wrote on the Huffington Post Web site. “I am sure I was not alone in privately urging the campaign over the last two weeks to use the moment to take her due, pass the torch and cement her grace.”’

Ah, yes, the cementing of one’s grace; the trowel’s slap against the wet lime. For Clinton, one can imagine, this is the sound of the bricks being laid for her mausoleum. To let go of this campaign, once an inevitable victory, and to accept its loss, her oblivion. How long must it have been since Clinton defined herself in anything but political terms?

Roman Polanski has suffered tragedy (the murder of his family) and inflicted harm and misery (by having sex with a thirteen year-old girl). He’s also imbued the world with grace through his artistic endeavors. His victim, 30 years on, expresses her desire to let go of his crime. That crime has defined him these past thirty years, but has also defined her, to some extent, as its victim. If she can let go, she will be free of that definition. Whereas oddly, and rightly one feels, he will remain attached to his.

Dr. Don McLeroy, a dentist in Central Texas, chairs the state’s education board. As the Times reports, Dr. McLeroy believes that ‘Earth’s appearance is a recent geologic event — thousands of years old, not 4.5 billion. “I believe a lot of incredible things,” he said, “The most incredible thing I believe is the Christmas story. That little baby born in the manger was the god that created the universe.”’

‘“I just don’t think [evolution is] true or it’s ever happened” … when he considers the case for evolution, Dr. McLeroy said, “it’s just not there.”’

I feel the same way about dentists. After all, before a dentist looks in your mouth, your teeth are fine, they’ve been getting along quite well. But as soon as a dentist pokes around in there all of a sudden you’ve got all of these problems that have been lurking for years.

And, come to think of it, I feel that way about Texas, too. The idea that such a state exists is just so preposterous. Sure, you can make a compelling case for Austin, but what about the rest? Naah. It’s just some left wing conspiracy to scare the rest of us into voting Democrat.

But if the Texas state education board succeeds in having schools teach the weaknesses of evolutionary theory, as it is dangerously close to doing, I may have to let go of the conviction that Texas and its dentists don’t exist.

Which brings me to today’s philosophic conundrum:

Should I drown my days of sorrow in red wine if it will only serve to extend them?

On how and why we can be distracted.

At $3 million per mile, if the Department of Homeland Security meets this year’s target of 690 miles of border fence between the US and Mexico, the construction budget will tally about $2.1 billion, a hefty slice of the overall budget for homeland security. Before the fence project was approved back in 2006, Michael Chertoff, who is in charge of building it, had previously expressed doubts about its effectiveness, especially in remote areas. More recently he’s been criticized for using his waiver of local laws to forge ahead with construction so that his agency can meet the 690 mile target set by the senate.

Since his appointment back in 2005, Chertoff has said that the US should be spending dollars and efforts wisely by sifting out high risk from low risk targets. He’s also admitted recently that the fence doesn’t do much more than deter the least motivated border crossers.

I realize that Chertoff has to do what he’s charged with doing. But here we have a situation in which the man in charge of homeland security clearly has his doubts about whether we should be dedicating so much and effort to building a fence that won’t keep out the more determined, and therefore higher-risk crossers.

Which brings us back to the true reason we’re building a fence. It’s got nothing to do with homeland security. House Republicans pushed the idea of the border fence because they were worried about a backlash from legislation that would give amnesty and legal status to illegal immigrants. They first wanted to do something to strengthen border security. The fence was it.

(As an ironic side note the proposed path of the fence splices the University of Texas campus in two, leaving the technology center and the golf course of the Mexican side of the border.)

Building the fence is incurring huge effort, huge expense, but most importantly is causing huge distraction from the real issues of what we’re trying to achieve and why.

In a characteristically painstaking and relentless investigation of the notorious photographs taken at Abu Ghraib, Errol Morris digs into the history and context of one particular photograph of MP Sabrina Harman smiling next to a corpse:

As Morris argues convincingly, this photograph is dangerously distracting. We find it almost impossible to see past Harman’s smile. We focus on the horror and disgust of the notion that someone would pose and smile for such a picture rather than wondering why the man is dead and what happened to him.

Morris reveals how the administration and the military used our instinctive horror as a ploy to distract us from the abuse, torture, and murder of prisoners. He also reveals that subsequent to this photograph, Harman realized that she’d been lied to that the prisoner, Al Jamadi, had died of a heart attack and went back to take a series of forensic photographs revealing the extensive injuries he’d suffered during interrogation.

Morris also tells us how it is that despite the extensive wrong-doings and crimes that US forces and contractors have committed during the Iraq war, at the implicit and explicit behest of the current administration, there’s been no appropriate accountability: By launching multiple investigations all focused on narrow slices of the big picture, the administration has effectively diffused our attention and blurred evidence of the overall pattern to the wrongdoing. Only the minor characters have been taken to task, the Harman’s of the world.

Morris points out in his article that we can be distracted for many reasons. We mistake Harman’s smile, for instance, for a real smile. But an expert in facial expressions concludes that it is simply a fake smile. A social smile. And we’re typically very poor at recognizing the difference. (Less than one percent of people can naturally detect the small clues that betray these kinds of differences in facial expression.)

Morris asks in his piece why we haven’t evolved to be better at avoiding distraction. The answer given? Because it hasn’t been that useful. But why not? Why isn’t it useful for us to know when we’re focusing on a border fence rather than border security, or seeing a fake smile and not a real smile?

In everyday life, we build up an additive perspective of people and events. We tend to be suspicious of strangers and wary of new circumstances. But over time we build up a consistent picture of our lives and the people in them. A fake smile here or there is immaterial to the greater perception we have of someone and his or her motives.

Whereas, when it comes to events and people in public life, distant from our everyday lives, but nevertheless critical in some ways to the lives we lead, evolution has had far less time to allow us to adapt the kinds of skills we need to make good judgments.

Prior to the advent of democracy, decisions of any broad weight were made by a few people and handed down without any chance for recourse. In a democracy, it’s important for us to understand and act on the reasons and evasions behind the building of a marginally useful border fence, but we’re ill-equipped to crunch all the necessary information and see past the distraction. Similarly to be fully understood, Sabrina Herman’s fake smile has to be studied and interpreted, many people interviewed, information unearthed and brought into focus; a feat only made possible by the modern invention of photography and by the assiduous and dogged attention of a documentary film-maker.

When we read Morris’s account of Sabrina Harman’s photographic record we’re persuaded that rather than being contemptible, she has actually been quite a brave figure. Under difficult conditions she opened her eyes to the bad acts of the war and captured them in a way that makes us feel more than a little uncomfortable about what we’ve personally done or not done to bring our leaders to account.

In an article today on the growing importance of DNA information in the criminal justice system, the New York Times reports: “All but eight states now give inmates varying degrees of access to DNA evidence that might not have been available at the time of their convictions.”

And in a NYTimes story on Saturday; Texas is moving ahead with execution by lethal injection (next up, a Honduran, Mr. Chi,) despite the Supreme Court’s last minute intervention the previous day to prevent a similar execution (since the drug administered may result in pain that could be considered cruel and unusual): “A lawyer here who represents Hondurans in the United States, Terence O’Rourke, has said Mr. Chi’s execution would violate international law.”

What struck me about these events, apart from the importance of the events themselves, was the philosophical basis for deciding matters of importance to society at the local, state, federal or even international level. I wondered why a prisoner in one state detention system should be denied access to DNA test results if, as a society, we were to conclude that access to such test results was reasonable and good. And why when we have international laws about some things, as a matter of simple humanity, we wouldn’t have international laws about others.

I realize that there are practical matters to consider (not least of which the difficulty of arriving at decisions and implementing on a large scale), and I realize that the constitution and legal system of the United States deliberately leaves many matters to be determined and decided by the local and state legislature, but from a philosophical perspective, such an arrangement troubles me. And it troubles me further that there seems to be such a fierce defense of the right for local and state legislatures to reach their own determinations. Surely if something of such importance as DNA access is appropriate in one jurisdiction it is appropriate in another?

I grew up in England where such things are determined far more homogeneously. The laws of the land don’t vary from place to place in England for matters of great importance (although there are by-laws for matters of limited importance). Which perhaps explains to some extent why it strikes me so oddly that something as important as a convicted person’s right to access DNA information can be withheld in some parts of the country and not in others.

To approach this philosophically: Ideally, a society creates rules and laws that serve its collective and individual interests. We can think of society at various levels — a small social group, an organization or community, a town or city, a state, a country, and the world. Sometimes the rules and laws of a particular group logically apply only to that group (the requirements for membership of a club, for instance). And sometimes the rules and laws of a particular group naturally intersect with a larger or different group — local, state, and federal laws for instance.

One can say that logically the rules and laws within the jurisdiction of a group should be appropriate to the universality of that which is being determined.

For instance, to take a simple example, laws about how close I can build my house to another house have a great deal to do with the particular geography and density of population of the place I live. The zoning laws of New York City probably don’t make sense in Billings Montana. The same could be said about noise ordinances, or any number of concerns that would naturally vary in their importance and interpretation from one place to another.

But the same does not seem to logically apply to the example of access to DNA evidence. Logically, if access to DNA evidence can mean the difference between incarceration and exoneration of the innocent, such right to access should be determined nationally not locally. Innocence or guilt does not vary from state to state.

Likewise, I would think that as a species we could find general agreement between countries on what is cruel or inhuman. (Sad to say that the current United States administration has not set good precedent on applying such logic.)

This is a theme and pattern that comes up again and again. Accepted processes and procedures, whether legal or otherwise, very often come about by custom and by the sway of particular events and people. Over time they become accepted. We don’t challenge their logical foundation.  Rarely do we take a set of problems and concerns and seek to understand them logically, rationally, from their founding principles. Logical interpretation won’t always provide the best solution or the only solution, but it is a perspective that should always be considered.

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