What about bacterial dignity?

Just how did the word “liberal” become a pejorative? John Lukacs explains in the Chronicle Review. It’s a good piece, but I didn’t quite agree with the last part. Lukacs writes:

Liberalism in its noblest, and also in its most essential, sense has always meant (and, to be fair, here and there it still means) an exaltation, a defense of the fundamental value and category of human dignity. But much of scientism and technology (yes, including the orthodoxy of Darwinism and the absolute belief in progress) declares that there was, there is, and there remains no fundamental difference between human beings and all other living beings. But if that is so, what happens to the emphasis on human dignity? Either human beings are unique or they are not. Either thesis may be credible, but not both. That is not just a question for religion.

I think both theses are misrepresented. Firstly, I don’t believe that it is only liberals who believe in “an exaltation, a defense of the fundamental value and category of human dignity”. Isn’t that what all of us believe in, including conservatives (and excluding communists)? Also, it is too simplistic to speak of orthodox Darwinism as concluding that “there remains no fundamental difference between human beings and all other living beings”. This is certainly true when we speak about the process of how we evolved and of the biological systems that sustain us, but that does not preclude the possibilty of dignity.

It is not speciesism to say that humans are different from apes, who are different from kangaroos, who are different from bacteria. Any Darwinian will agree with that, and will elaborate that one of the qualities that sets up apart, indeed our most favourable adaptation, is our large brain, and the powers of cognition that we have developed. Our brains enable us to reason about things, learn how to live with each other and form a moral sense. “[T]he fundamental value and category of human dignity” arises from that. The two theses Lukacs talks about, thus, are not just mis-stated, but also perfectly compatible.

Towards a Columbian donut cartel

Have you had your dopamine hit today? Jacob Sullum writes in Reason about recent findings that high-calorie products, like donuts, ice-cream and cheeseburgers, are, ahem, addictive. Sullum writes of how activists are now trying to force food companies to warn consumers about the perils of what they consume – presumably on the note of “Statutory Warning – Eating chocolates can be dangerously addictive”.

I’d probably burst out laughing if I ever saw a warning like that, pausing only to pop said dangerous object in my mouth. The bottomline, as Sullum points out, is that people have volition and control over their actions, and are not slaves to their biochemicals – unless they choose to be. He writes:

[There is] a misunderstanding of drug addiction, which is neither inevitable nor inescapable. The government's own statistics indicate that the vast majority of people who use drugs—even such reputedly powerful substances as heroin and crack—never become addicts. Those who do often manage to stop or moderate their use. There are about as many former smokers in this country as smokers, for example, and they typically quit without formal "treatment."

This applies even more to overeating. “People do, after all, shed pounds when their reasons for eating less outweigh their desire to eat more,” Sullum writes. “Just as important, people can avoid overeating in the first place, no matter how ‘truly delicious and addictive’ the food they encounter.”

This is not to say that obesity is desirable or that pornography, which is also “addictive”, is not a bad thing at all. It simply means that people are in charge of their own lives, and of the choices they make. It’s a cop-out to blame the cheeseburger manufacturer for your high cholestrol. We all have strong impulses and pulls to deal with, in differing degrees, and no one else has moral responsibility for them but ourselves.

Hey, I burped. Time to call my lawyer.

Teeth to the left of the spine

Two solutions to the stem-cell debate.

Say yes to steroids?

Andrew Sullivan argues for the use of steroids in sports. He writes:

We have drugs for hard-ons; and we have elaborate plastic surgery for anyone feeling ugly or fat. We have fat-burning pills and hair-growing treatments. We have pills to send us to sleep; we have medical contraptions to give us better sleep (yay!); we have addictive drugs, like caffeine, to wake us up and keep us awake. The line between pharmaceuticals that actually cure illness and those that enhance our quality of life, or extend it to lengths once thought inimaginable, is getting blurrier all the time…

… [T]he brouhaha over steroids in sports strikes me as somewhat off-key. Our cultural norm is that drugs that do not harm you are perfectly legit in increasing your enjoyment of life, or enhancing your ability to perform certain tasks. Why, then, are steroids so illegitimate in sports?

The issue, of course, is broader than that of steroids, and broader than that of sports. The kind of doping that sportspeople are most likely to do in the years to come is what is beginning to be known as gene doping, and that is almost impossible to catch. It is also no different, in essence, from the different kinds of gene therapy that are now available.

When we talk of genetic enhancement, of course, we enter a domain of furious argument, of moral questions about whether or not we should try to improve upon biology, and to undermine, in the words of Leon Kass, “the idea of humanness and of our human life and the meaning of our embodiment and our relation to ancestors and descendants”. (Kass was speaking in the context of in vitro fertilisation, but it might well have been about stem cell research, or even gene doping.)

I had blogged on just this subject a few weeks ago on my cricket blog, where I’d written:

The opposition to genetic engineering and stem-cell research today is identical in nature to the opposition to birth control and in virto fertilisation, and as misguided. If we went by the logic behind it – that we should accept our biological destiny and not try to control it – then we'd be against antibiotics and vaccination and angioplasty and vitamin pills as well. The average lifespan of humans has increased, in the US, from around 45 to around 78 in the 100 years of the 20th century, and this is all because of one reason – that, unique among species, to a gradually increasing extent, we have the ability to transcend biology.

Is it not absurd, then, to transcend biology in every other sphere but sport, which is meant to showcase the fittest humans? I had written:

Is it okay for someone who has muscular dystrophy to seek treatment through gene therapy? Clearly, yes. Is it okay, then, for someone to use the same therapy for cosmetic purposes? Well, if you can get a boobjob or a facelift, surely it is. In that case, is it wrong for the same therapy to be used for sporting purposes? If we can strive to improve our bodies for any other purpose, why not to win medals or excel in sport? And why should sportsmen not have access to the same tools that non-sportsmen do?

On the whole, I agree with Sullivan that there is little we can do to regulate the use of drugs in sports – as he says, “the steroid technology almost always out-strips the testing technology”. But the difference in future will be that doping in sport will be far more advanced than steroid use, and the lines between genetic “doping” for sport and genetic enhancement for health and lifestyle reasons will be harder to determine.

We begin life, and sport, with a set of imponderables – the abilities that we are born with. Surely we all deserve an equal opportunity to go beyond.

The mousetrap

Donald Duck got drunk and made a pass at Nicole Kidman. It was extremely embarrassing because at the time she and Tom Cruise were still married. Donald was rather hostile to Tom, I recall, and felt Tom was being offered all the roles he wanted. I recall Mr. Eisner at that party taking Donald outside to calm him down.

That’s Mickey Mouse speaking in “Surprise rocks Disney trial” by Woody Allen in the New Yorker.

Fact or fiction?

"What kind of novels do you write, fact or fiction?", Ian McEwan was asked once, at an airport. As he explains to Alan Cowell in the New York Times, that distinction isn’t an easy one to make.

Why tolerate fouls?

I do ok when I write on cricket, but I must confess that I can’t understand soccer at all. One of the big headlines in India yesterday was of how the Brazilian striker Cristiano Delima Junior died on the field after being fouled by the opposing goalkeeper. The replay of the foul looks ordinary enough: striker scores, goalkeeper lashes out as they both fall down. But goalie gets up, striker doesn’t. Later photographs show him lying still and clearly lifeless, his eyes rolled up in their sockets. His team, Dempo, ends up winning that game, which is the Federation Cup final, 2-0, both the goals having being scored by Junior. But Junior is dead.

Tragedies can happen in any sport, and soccer is far less dangerous than many others. But what has always befuddled me, as an occasional viewer who tunes in once in two years to the Euro or the World Cup, is why there are so many fouls in the game. Fouls slow down the game and make it less attractive, and without them games would have more goals, and many more sparkling attacks would be allowed to proceed instead of being unfairly cut down.

Everybody agrees that fouls are unfair. That is why, after all, they are penalised. But if they are wrong, why not cut down on them entirely? Why doesn’t every foul carry a mandatory yellow card, which would mean that anybody who commits two fouls in a game is out of the game. Fouls would come down drastically, the game would be more about players’ skills in playing the game than in their ability to trip or push somebody, and the spectators would get more value for money.

I suspect soccer fans will find my musing rather naïve. There are too many things about how that game is run that I can’t fathom, like how their player-contracts are structured, and how clubs can "sell" players to each other. I’ll stick to cricket, I think.

“We are all subcultures now."

So says Andrew Sullivan in a piece in the Sunday Times, where he argues that “there is no unifying American centre any more”. He writes:

If a Carson or a Cronkite were to emerge today, where would he go? The biggest phenomenon in news-opinion programming is Bill O’Reilly’s The O’Reilly Factor on Fox News. On a good night he gets 3m viewers. That’s about 1% of the country. And he’s the market leader! Even the network news shows get a fraction of the audience they once commanded. Cable, satellite and the internet have all fractured audiences into a thousand tiny, lucrative and not-so-lucrative markets.

And this, Sullivan concludes, is why George W Bush won the recent elections. “In a world without authority and with danger and confusion,” he writes, “Bush is a rock. Even when Americans disagree with him, he seems strong and unyielding. His penchant for absolutes is tailored for a culture where doubt and confusion rule.”

Sullivan’s facts are well-marshalled, but I suspect that his conclusion holds only for the converted. To supporters of Bush he must no doubt be a comforting figure in dangerous times, but to his opponents, those dangerous times would be just the reason to look elsewhere, for misplaced certitude can be more lethal than confusion. Of course, the supporters now outnumber the opponents, but I don’t think one can blame the fragmentation of the media for that.

Spread that ink

Dick Meyer attacks the perception that George W Bush won the presidential elections because of “moral values”. In an article in The Washington Post, he says that “moral values” are “a bit of a Rorschach test”. It means different things to different people, and it is simplistic to say that opposition to gay marriage or late-term abortion won Bush the elections.

The notion of “moral values” being the deciding factor in the election came because of the exit polls, where 22% of the voters cited it as the most important factor in the elections, and 80% of them voted for Bush. But Meyer says that the exit-poll questionnaire itself was flawed. He writes:

If the national exit poll had been worded differently, moral values would not have been the top issue and this argument wouldn't be happening.

If, for example, one of the choices on the exit poll list combined "terrorism" [19%] and "Iraq," [15%] it probably would have been the top concern and nobody would be talking about moral values.

If economy/jobs [20%] and taxes were one item instead of two, it might have been the winner. Who knows what the exit poll would have found if "truth in government" were an option. Or "character."

Bouncing the undertaker

"Somebody once said that the ultimate in financial planning is to bounce the cheque to the undertaker. I'm gonna try to do that." – Mike Bloomberg, who is planning to sell his eponymous company and set up a charitable trust with the proceeds.

A blogging murderer

Finally, the blogosphere has a murderer. Rachelle Waterman, a teenage blogger in Alaska, has allegedly done away with her mother, whom she would refer to, in her blog posts, as “the female parental unit”. This is not the blogging equivalent of a snuff film, though – the blog itself has no references to the murder.

A wad of dollars, and a ‘corporate’ scandal

The Economist correspondent in Congo is driving around in Goma, a town in Congo, when a mob mistakes him for a member of the UN peacekeeping force. They smash the windows of his car, and try to strangle him. How does he escape? “[B]y pulling a wad of dollars out of his sock and throwing it in the air, and then driving off in the ensuing maul.”

Read the full story here, in which the correspondent, having survived, tells us of why the UN peacekeepers are hated so much there – because of “revelations that some peacekeepers have been sexually molesting Congolese children.” Apparently, “the UN has launched an investigation which insiders say will seek to discover whether MONUC [the peacekeeping force] has been penetrated by organised paedophiles who recruit their friends.”

The UN is taking quite a battering these days. In Rocky Mountain News, Dave Kopel asks:

Suppose that a big corporation headquartered in New York City were the center of the largest embezzlement scheme in world history ($21 billion), which enriched big oil companies, foreign dictators, terrorists, and its own employees. Further, suppose that the corporation's own union had declared its lack of confidence in the corporation's management, because of endemic corruption, and because of senior management's lax attitude towards sexual abuse, including coercive sex with underage girls.

Also suppose that the son of the company president was getting paid by another business that profited from the embezzlement scheme, and the company president had claimed that his son's affiliation ended in 1999, but actually the son continued with the business until 2004. And suppose that the company president and his staff were obstructing government investigations into their own corruption. Oh, and let's also suppose that the corporate president and his underlings had attempted to influence the recent U.S. presidential election.

Yes, we know who he’s talking about, of course. So in case someone ever mistakes you for an employee of the UN, make sure you remember about the stash in your sock.

Dick throws a party

George W Bush is arrested for War Crimes – and it’s Google’s fault.

It's my privilege

Eugene Volokh in the New York Times:

Say that an IRS agent leaks a politician's income tax return to a newspaper reporter, an act that is a federal felony. The newspaper may have a First Amendment right to publish the information, especially since it bears on a matter of public interest. The government, meanwhile, is entitled to punish the agent, to protect citizens' privacy and ensure a fair and efficient tax system.

To punish the agent, prosecutors may need to get the leaker's name from the reporter; but if the reporter refuses to testify because of a "journalist's privilege" to protect confidential sources, the agent may never be caught.

Read the full piece here. Volokh speaks of how the “journalist’s privilege” is under threat these days, and argues in its defense. He also argues, rather more controversially, that it be extended to bloggers as well. “The First Amendment can't give special rights to the established news media and not to upstart outlets like ours,” he argues. “Freedom of the press should apply to people equally, regardless of who they are, why they write or how popular they are.”

But if everybody blogs, then the journalist’s privilige would be extended to everybody, in which case it would hardly be a privilege. The sticky problem here is that while blogging is an exciting new journalistic medium, it is also the only journalistic medium that has no entry barrier – most of us can’t start a newspaper or a news channel, but it takes five minutes on Blogspot to start to blog. And it is hardly possible to draw a line between a journalistic blogger and a non-journalistic one.

Volokh goes on to propose a modification of the journalist’s privilege, which, if it is extended to bloggers, amounts to an amendment of the First Amendment. You haven’t heard the last of this issue.

Are you average?

[W]hat troubles people isn’t so much being average as settling for it. Everyone knows that averageness is, for most of us, our fate. And in certain matters—looks, money, tennis—we would do well to accept this. But in your surgeon, your child’s pediatrician, your police department, your local high school? When the stakes are our lives and the lives of our children, we expect averageness to be resisted.

From The Bell Curve, by Atul Gawande in The New Yorker.

Streaming media

The Guardian takes the piss out of Marcel Duchamp. I particularly enjoyed Infinipiss.

Well, we did catch a fly

Now Microsoft is entering the blogosphere. These folks from Redmond have never been at the cutting edge of things, but are masters of building a better mousetrap, as they showed us with operating systems and the internet browser. But Linux and Mozilla are fighting them hard in those areas, and by the looks of Microsoft’s new blogging service, it’s nowhere near as good as Blogger or Movable Type. Better mousetrap? Sorry fellas, this cat is dying.

Two Zimbabwes

Mugabe bans charity feeding 90,000 children, and ICC claim tour boosts England's reputation. Nice.

So, what's your mutation?

Mutants, by Armand Marie Leroi, has won the Guardian First Book Award. Here’s Oliver Burkeman speaking to Leroi about the book, where he tells us that “[w]e are all mutants. But some of us are more mutant than others”. And here's an extract.

"Shame for the humanities"

A man of the left rips into “The Derrida Industry”. Brian Leiter explains why Derrida’s “legacy is one of shame for the humanities”. Well, maybe so, but I can’t quite understand what Leiter means when he writes:

Was it entirely an accident that at the same time that deconstruction became the rage in literary studies (namely, the 1980s), American politics went off the rails with the Great Prevaricator, Ronald Reagan? Is it simply coincidental that the total corruption of public discourse and language – which we may only hope has reached its peak at the present moment – coincided with the collapse of careful reading and the responsible use of language in one of the central humanities disciplines?

The connection between Derrida and Reagan befuddled me. I’d always thought that “corruption of public discourse and language” and the “collapse of careful reading and the responsible use of language” characterised Reagan’s opponents on the left. I must be wrong.