On Politics

Nixon: "I understand the system. I can control it. Maybe not control it completely, but tame it enough to make it do some good"
Student: "It sounds like your talking about a wild animal"
Nixon: "Maybe I am"
Nixon (1995)

The nature of politics is channeling the flow of energy. Like an engineer building a dam to control the flow of a river, good politicians use rhetoric to channel human energies into tangible ends. The energy isn't created so much as it is harnessed. Although some may use rhetoric to enflame the masses, they are playing off of preexisting grievances. The reservoir of energy was waiting to be used, such politicians just "top off" the anger.

The political energy is generated by individuals, from day-to-day experiences. Our feelings about what's right or wrong with the world are derived from the little annoyances and glories we encounter. But while creation occurs at the personal level, direction and release is a matter of the collective. When the masses are grouped under a common ideology, the execution of political energies has another name: power.

The efficient direction and release of power is what politics is all about. Power needs no rational justification for it's use, it's existence is it's own justification. How we judge "good" from "bad" politics is how we square the effects with our own value systems, in subjective terms. Judging the effects of policy changes is definately a long term endeavour. However, judging politicians is a matter of how well they channel energies into they're own ends. That is, how well they avoid disaster.

A disaster for the dam builder will probably be obvious right away. Either it holds water or it doesn't. How well the politician directs and focuses the energy of his power vehicle, while avoiding collateral damage and waste, is an indicator. Every action, every speech, every offhand comment will have an observable effect. Achieving ends with as little unnecessary action as possible is best. This could be called "elegance".

Control of political energies is unreliable at best. There is a temporary window for using these energies. It must either be expended or dispersed. Fire or disarm. People have a tendency to smolder and quietly nurse resentments. This is a dangerous kind of weapon to leave lying around. Without direction, a neglected mass may explode.

If you're trying to counter the momentum of an opponent, remember that these energies cannot be stopped without a expenditure of equal and opposite energy. This is waste. It's better to counter the thrust of an opponent by redirecting it into a harmless direction. Or, better yet, redirect to your own ends. Never box in an opponent. Always leave them an avenue to retreat into. Open this channel before conflict, and turn them into it. Don't try to obliterate an enemy. Some would have you believe that this is the cost holding political principles. That's false. Any principle, no matter how noble, must yield to reality. Else, what good are they?

Obama Paranoia

Paul Krugman's latest column describes the spite-based Republican opposition to Obama. Krugman cites several examples over the past 20 years of post-Reagan-era tactics. I think there's something else to it, though. There is a very strong sense of paranoia in the middle-america right wing activist. They all seem to believe there's something inherently unwholesome and sinister about Obama's motives (secret motives).

You could chalk this up to the same old anti-Democrat mentality (e.g. Whitewater), or the effect of Fox-news fear mongering. I think this misses the target, though. Fox helps grow doubt and suspicion of the Obama Administration, but that doubt has a natural base before Fox exploits it.

I believe that what scares these people most of all is Obama's lack of emotion and drama. The man is almost always as cool as a cucumber. This is very different from the images of the left to which we've grown accustomed. Most notably in recent memory: Howard Dean. Manic and goofy, a smiley nutjob. That image is still burned into our brains, and Obama directly contradicts that "knowledge" of what the left is.

We can adjust to this image in one of two ways. Either we revise our conceptions of what the left looks and sounds like, or we conclude that the man is simply very good at hiding his "true nature". Obviously the fringe Right has chosen the latter option. This assumption is an excellent breeding ground for suspicion and paranoia, because if the man is this good at disguising himself, there's no knowing what else he could be hiding...

Life in the "Echo Chamber"

What a pack of weaklings we've become.

If anyone other than myself (a tall order, I know) is reading this, I want to you participate in an experiment. I want you to think back over the past 6 months. I want you to think of conversation you've had with another person (excluding the internet, which is a breeding ground for anonymous mudslinging) where you respectfully disagreed with that person regarding politics, philosophy or religion (the big 3 nasties).

Can you think of one? I bet not even one. Me neither. The last time I tried was at work and I backed down when the volume started to rise.

I think that kind of discourse is literally going extinct. Somewhere along the way we've psyched ourselves out. We've managed to invert reality in our own minds. What I mean is, people today believe that courage means quietly smoldering and nursing resentments while listening to the enemy, keeping your mouth shut, and waiting to vent with likeminded friends. How did this happen? We've sorted ourselves into these political cliques, and the thought of mixing with ideological foreigners seems completely backwards to us. It means that you're "squishy" or your "trying to have it both ways".

An idea is only as good as the reason which supports it. Reason is only as good as the data which feeds it. Without fresh, reliable data from as many sources as possible, we cripple ourselves. Yet we think that by hanging out with the same predictable crowd, and reenforcing eachothers ideas by regurgitating the same tired, hackneyed facts and figures, we somehow make ourselves stronger or make our ideas... More true?

What adds insult to injury is the supposed courage involved in this. What could be more cowardly than only sticking up for what you believe when you're with people you're sure will agree with you?

Philosophy, Religion and Politics all have something in common. They all hinge on the concept of truth. Philosophy and Religion are obvious enough, but Politics is special. Politics involves a more practical (and much more satisfying) form of truth: utility. What works makes for good policy. What doesn't work is bad policy.

When you take a step into anything that involves truth, you burden yourself with a heavy obligation. An obligation to think and act in all things with honesty and personal humility. Finding things that work means trying a lot of solutions, and having your (sometimes well justified) ideas get disproved. It means accepting these difficult realities with good faith and good humor. It means taking the high road when everyone else is slinging mud. Why? Because that's how you get what you want. That's how you get to good ideas.

But Americans today largely aren't concerned with good ideas. In the modern mind, knowing what's right is more important than finding what's right. Courage today means sitting securely in your impenetrable fortress, looking across the miles of open frontier and sneering.

The Problem of Evil

Andrew Sullivan has an ongoing debate with Jerry Coyne, the last post can be found here. Andrew is putting forward an argument that human suffering - from a spiritual perspective - isn't altogether bad and actually may be very necessary. I agree with Andrew's point, but I see it as side-stepping the root of the paradox. Even if the experience of human suffering could be seen as a good thing, you still have to address the existence of evil, in one form or another.

If God:
A) Exists and
B) Is wholely good
Then you must conclude that anything resulting from God's actions (for Christianity that means the entirety of creation) is good.

If we believe any element of existence possesses even one particle of evil, that negates the supposed nature of God. Or negates his existence altogether. You end up a two extremes: A perfect God and a perfect creation (Evil being more of a personal inconvience rather than a universal absolute) or an imperfect God and an imperfect creation (like the Greek myths).

A Christian might counter by invoking the idea of agency. God created man with the power to freely choose his actions (a property with is good), and as a result Man chose evil and has "fallen from Grace". This tactic attempts to shift the focus to Man, and away from God. Man freely chose evil, therefore man is responsible for the existence of evil.

I don't think this is a fair argument. A perfect God would be able to create a version of Man which always freely chooses good. In other words, a perfect man. You can argue that nature of perfection and free-choice until the cows come home, but the most important facts are that the existence of imperfection contradicts the supposed nature of God.

Ius Latii

Like every other significant problem in our society, the immigration issue has been simplified to the point of grotesqueness. The dueling champions are two political caricatures: Squishy Liberal Appeasement Monkey and Raging Conservative Crypto-Nazi. We've seen this dance many times, and it looks like we're gearing up for another go-round.

When you get past the distractions (race, territory and culture) the root of the immigration problem is this: there is a foreign element which impacts our system, and we have very little visibility and control of this element. That should our first concern. Since the illegal immigrant population exists ourside the legal system, we can't even conduct a proper census. Current estimates are wildly inconsistent.

The two solutions are:
A: Find and forcibly expel all of them from the country, and create a barrier to keep any more from coming in.
B: Find a way to incorporate them into the system.

It continues to surprise me that modern conservatives insist that A is the only acceptable choice. In the interests of fiscal responsibility and realism, the brute force method should be met with overwhelming skepticism. Besides the immense resources necessary to forcibly remove a chunk of the population, the impact to the economy is impossible to estimate. Cities with large immigrant populations like San Antonio and L.A. would see a significant piece of the economic landscape simply disappear.

Is it not more prudent, realistic and responsible to grant limited rights to these people, tax them and by those means regulate the industries that employ them? Strengthening our borders is fine, but fences can be cut, and walls can be scaled. If you remove the incentive to come here, the problem will resolve itself naturally. It's not citizenship, it's not amnesty, it's simply accepting the reality of the situation and no more.

Conservative polititians understand this point, I think. They probably even privately agree. They publicly disagree, not out of ignorance, but political necessity. When it comes to constituent support, you have everything to gain from "standing up for your principles" and everything to lose from pragmatism. A takeaway here is that adhering to principles is sometimes the easiest thing in the world. Depending on which guns you're sticking to, it may require no discipline or strong character at all.