God knows I'm no theologian

But a recent conversation I had about the nature of love versus the nature of infatuation made me think about how the way people have conceptualized their relationships with God has changed over time. In this conversation about love versus infatuation, I argued that infatuation is when someone will willingly do anything for someone -- subjugate her own will to that of another, happily and be fulfilled in the subjugation. Love, on the other hand, is when someone will willingly not do something she'd very much like to for the sake of the person she loves. To put a finer point on the distinction, in the infatuation case, one's own will is completely aligned with that of another so that is no difference between fulfilling one's own desires and obeying the will of another person. In the love case, there's a recognition of two distinct agendas, and a very real sense of self-sacrifice. I further argued that at some stages of life, especially when one is young, infatuation is the only possible romantic relationship, whereas later, as one matures, love becomes possible.

Then I thought, this is kind of the case with some people's relationship with the Judeo-Christian God, from a time when Abraham would kill his own son, to a time now of progressive Protestantism when departures from God's will are forgiven entirely, indeed entirely accepted. Of course, this parallelism implies a nonexistent moral judgment on my part of these different relationships with God. I just thought it was akin to Hegel's ideas about the evolution of the collective human spirit, since he saw God as the manifestation of that collective, and here I've just drawn a parallel between the maturing of a person allowing infatuation to become love with the rise of progressive Protestantism allowing pure sacrifice to God to become tolerance for freedom. There's a linear, normative narrative beast hiding somewhere at the back of my head, and it's making me see and say the darndest things.

Surprise!

Surprise! I'm back. I've decided that months that begin with "A" are the only suitable ones for blogging. Thusly, I make my return. But is it a return at all? As far as the weather in Brooklyn is concerned, it's still April, in which case, that four month hiatus from blogging was entirely illusory. Busted, hiatus.

It's vacation time, so it means I'm reading something pretentious, intellectual, and preferably, French (in English) -- this time, it's Foucault's Madness and Civilization. After 50 pages, I'm really enjoying it, and I wish he were still around because I'd love him to explain what the "terrorist" means to Western civilization. Just as he used Europe's understanding of madness and the insane to explore how society thought of itself, I wish he would do something similar with the modern West's conceptualization of the "terrorist." The terrorist is the bogeyman of our era -- like the madman in the Renaissance, or the Communist of the 1950s, the terrorist is our antagonizer, a mythic adversary and outsider lurking somewhere in the inside.

The image of the generic Islamic terrorist that exists in Bush administration rhetoric and common wisdom is one of a poor, disillusioned young man who decides he hates the West so much, he's willing to sacrifice his life to destroy its property and kill its people. The terrorist is a terrorist in Western eyes because of an intersection of economic reasons (he is poor, so he is unhappy and disaffected) and religious reasons (he is trained by Islamofascists to hate the peaceful, freedom-loving, capitalist, Westerners).

But, surprise!, this image is (at least) half wrong. In the just-published book by Alan B. Krueger, What Makes a Terrorist: Economics and the Roots of Terrorism, the author explains that most terrorists are middle class, not impoverished. Poverty is part of the picture, but it is not their own poverty -- it is the poverty of their countrymen or fellow Muslims. But this evidence-based conclusion flies in the face of most Westerners' now intuitive understanding of what motivates a terrorist -- why a person becomes a terrorist.

Just like Renaissance- and classical-era thinkers misunderstood the source of madness, most Westerners misunderstand the source of terrorism. What's more, the madman and the terrorist are misunderstood in similar ways. The madman, in the classical era, is defined as such because he cannot be made to work -- unlike the other poor people and petty criminals who found themselves in pensioners' prisons during the era. He is an adversary to the economic system, and cannot be made to become part of it. His intractable idleness and madness are closely interrelated. Similarly, the terrorist is a terrorist because of his lack of economic success -- his own inability to find well-paying labor. Thus, in both cases, it is a personal unfitness for economic life that defines the madman and creates the terrorist. This genre of error also applies to the bogeyman of the last era -- the Communist. In Dos Passos' U.S.A, his middle class characters speak about Communists as if they are shiftless failures, who want to remedy their own economic failure with revolution.

So at the birth of capitalism during the classical era, and in the midst of its ascendancy during the Cold War, and, now, at its pinnacle, the popular imagination is fascinated by the dangerous outsider who cannot participate in the system. One might think that this belief about economic losers becoming the era's bogeymen would inspire in the West a desire to make sure more people reap capitalism's rewards -- and some people do come to that conclusion. But those on the right, perhaps the most strident purveyors of capitalism and the West, refuse this course in favor of capture, imprisonment, and constant conflict. No systemic changes are needed; only punishment of the individuals who stray. Pure capitalism rewards individuals without a thought for the externalities that harm the collective. Similarly, those on the right -- the proponents of this pure capitalism -- aim to punish individual transgressors without thinking about how the system could be changed to integrate them.

And so we arrive at the starkest difference between the rightists of the West and real terrorists -- not the bogeymen of Western imagination. Rightists of the West wish to punish individuals who they believe are motivated by individual economic failure. But if Krueger is to be believed, terrorists are not so motivated, but driven instead by the poverty of their fellows. Perhaps it is hard for the Western mind, especially the conservative, Western mind, to conceptualize a terrorist in this way because it is so not Western -- not about individual success and responsibility, but about collective success.

In any case, I wish Foucault were around because, surprise!, he would have much more interesting things to say.

Econo-messed up

When I was a junior in college, on the first day of Game Theory class, our professor had the class run through a prisoner's dilemma. We were all to imagine that our grade for the class would be determined by this one exercise, in which we write either an alpha or a beta (beeeeta, in his English accent) on a piece of paper. We would then be randomly paired with another student. If we had both put alpha, we'd get B's. If we had both written beta, we'd be rewarded with B+'s. However, if one of us put alpha and the other beta, the one who wrote alpha would be rewarded with an A, and the one who wrote beta would be punished with a C. Thus the prisoner's dilemma--everyone wants to get a B+, but no one wants to risk getting a C, and everyone, by the logic of game theory, should write alpha.

I, of course, being far too moral and upstanding for my own good, wrote beta, and it turned out that around 40% of my classmates did as well. The rest were alpha-writing bastards.

Having taken the class and learned my lesson, I got the chance to do the same exercise with the same professor, only this time at business school (very Boy Meets World). This time, I wrote alpha, and got to explain to everyone else in the class why it was the "strictly dominant" strategy. Afterwards, I thought a lot about the fact that the ethical rightness or wrongness of the options hadn't changed, but my beliefs about what was normatively right had. My moral calculus, unchanged, had now been outweighed by a weightier economic, or utilitarian, calculus--I had been taught that cooperation gets punished, and rightly so, since it's "strictly dominated."

Fast forward to the release of the Yale School of Managements magazine Q(n) and this essay by Jim Barron, which casually mentions some research that has shown that studying economics makes a person less likely to cooperate. The study can be found here, and among its findings are:

1. Economists donate less to charity than predicted by their incomes;
2. Even one semester of economics will teach you the costs of being honest, and make you less likely to be so;
3. And, the smoking gun, given a prisoner's dilemma situation akin to the one I faced, graduate students of economics are about 1.5x more likely to defect than the average college student.

So there it is--economists are bastards. Going back to Jim Barron's point, though, anyone who studies economics is likely to start behaving as if the precepts of utility maximization are widely-heald determinants of behavior. They are--among economists, and MBA students. Most other people value things like cooperation, doing the right thing, being good.

This is why it's so frustrating that there isn't a required ethics class as part of the core curriculum at SOM. We're all getting exposed to these potentially corrosive concepts without the countervailing weight of normative ethics. Utility (profit) maximization is not the be all and end all of decision-making. Without ethics in the curriculum, when an ethical question comes up, there tends to be a lot of hand-waving and gesturing--"Shouldn't we worry about this?"--but there isn't any sense that there are good, rational ways to deal with ethical dilemmas. There are, and I'd been exposed to them before I took Game Theory. Perhaps that's why I was so willing to play the strictly dominated strategy of cooperation.

Much Badiou about nothing

From a Monday post at Talking Points Memo:

[T]here’s one aspect of this story that seems to have attracted no editorial mention or public interest. Implicit in all the coverage is the assumption—by Democrats and Republicans alike—that the Attorney General is going up to Capitol Hill to lie. As far as I can tell, this is a universal assumption. The Republicans are rooting for Mr. Gonzales to be successful in his perjury, to tell a coherent story that his enemies cannot break down. The Democrats are rooting the other way, off course. They’re hoping that their ace interrogators will be able to shoot enough holes in Mr. Gonzales’ story that they can destroy his credibility. But nobody seems to find it shocking or tragic that the Attorney General of the United States is going to lie to congress. . . . I’m sure that if Gonzales makes it through his testimony without being totally discredited, Fred Barnes and Brit Hume will be all over Fox news boasting that the Senators “never laid a glove on him.” But no one seems the least bit concerned about his truthfulness, just his tactics. . . .

This seems largely true to me, but it doesn't take even a casual observer long to recall other examples of thoughtlessly accepted lying in the realm of politics. Useful, though, that this one is so obvious and so especially egregious--when the sitting defender of justice is expected to lie for political gain. Justice is concerned with nothing if not the truth, and there need be no better evidence for the politicization of the Justice Department than the fact that the Attorney General cannot tell the truth because of his own political machinations.

Alain Badiou, the contemporary French philosopher, would argue that any notion of politics that allows such baldfaced lying is sick. Badiou wants to align politics, justice and, most importantly, the truth, so that politics is always a "truth process"--a way of discovering and fighting for the core truth of a situation. He has something interesting to say about the emptiness of American politics:

The antinomy of truth and debate is a bad joke. Except, of course, if one deems it necessary to assert special rights for falsity and for lying. In this case, it would instead be necessary to say the following: debate, which confers rights without norms upon falsity and lying, constitutes the very essence of politics. But what Revault d’Allones calls ‘the courage of judgement’ is more like the laziness of those who are sheltered from every norm and see their errors or their lies protected by right (Metapolitics 14-5).

To put it simply, Badiou argues that a culture of political debate that protects liars and does nothing to condemn them (as evidenced by the crowing of Fox News commentators) is one in which political debate will never yield the truth. Watching the talking heads on the news, and this seems so right; they are not seeking the truth, they are seeking nothing, and they are surrounding it with hand-waving and yammering to keep all of us watching.