The abolition of chattel slavery was once a radical, utopian idea. William Lloyd Garrison and Lysander Spooner, among others, thought and spoke about it in radical, principles-based ways that are to a considerable degree forerunners of radical libertarian thought today. It seems to me that if you are going to dismiss principled, unpopular libertarian convictions like "people should not be subject to arbitrary restrictions on their freedom of movement based on the accident of their ancestry or place of birth," or "people rightfully own their own bodies and therefore have the right to put what substances they please into them," you have to explain what makes those so different from the once-unpopular conviction that it is a terrible wrong for one person to own another.
I would also push back on the idea of its being a radical, utopian idea. Jefferson understood it to be a moral depravity - Jefferson who is the virtual face of slave ownership in America! The radical abolitionists certainly aided in ensuring a penalty would be paid in blood, and I think that is as much why they are honored, as any curious notion that they came up with the idea that slavery was wrong. They are the direct forebears of Yankee progressives who also like to make things happen.
Fair. But understanding something to be depraved or desirable is pretty far, in my mind, from committing to actually move toward its abolition or achievement. The universal, borderless brotherhood of man is an old enough idea at this point to have made it into the classical canon-- I just sang in the chorus for a wonderful performance of Beethoven's 9th Symphony, with Schiller's words from 1785 ringing out "Alle Menschen werden Brüder wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt"-- but those active in its practical realization remain few.
An easy way to divine what people feel is most significant about something, is to raise the subject of whether slavery was not likely to survive much longer and the Civil War could have been avoided. I am not well versed enough in history to even have an opinion on the subject, but that's not the point. You will find that people react very strongly with horror and suspicion to the idea. This gets at the seemingly necessary punitive aspect of radicalism, and it somewhat blurs the line of virtue - between say a Jefferson, who saw (to some degree) his own complicity in wrong, and an abolitionist - or what you might call the abolitionist's present-day heir.
I think enslavement coud have persisted in the South anchored by plantation agriculture for many decades more. That's not to say that it coud have been worked in the new states that were being admitted. Probably both North and South were wrong to fight over the extension of enslavement.
Could slavery have been abolished without the Civil War?
Yes
Was it?
No
Whose Fault Was That?
I mostly blame the Southern Planter Class.
They should have accepted the nature of their situation. Instead they seem to have taken the moral critiques of their way of life too personally.
It wasn't enough to say that they had a good personal thing going that would last for a certain while (Jefferson, Washington). No, slavery had to be an absolute positive good. It was a GOOD THING they had slaves. And it was a GOOD THING that it be expanded all the way to the Pacific Ocean. And maybe down into Mexico through wars of conquest. And the northerners should aid in their slavery via the fugitive slave act, etc.
A review of the pre-civil war era clearly shows Southern Slave Power as the primary antagonists. It didn't have to be that way, but that's how it was.
Could the abolitionist side have performed better?
Sure, I think keeping Virginia (and thus North Carolina) in the Union might have been possible with better action by Lincoln during the secession crisis. That was a tragedy. Still, at least he understood keeping the border states in was pivotal (unlike the pure abolitionists, who probably would have lost them all at the beginning of the war).
> They should have accepted the nature of their situation. Instead they seem to have taken the moral critiques of their way of life too personally.
They were men, and pugnacious, mettlesome men at that. _You_ did not accept the nature of your situation when aboli... public health authorities came down on your public school district to force your small children to wear masks all day, wielding moral critiques of your maskless way of life ("how dare you endanger abstract grandma through what we in our boundless and unassailable wisdom declare to be dangerous behavior?") But it is always easier in such cases to advise others to give in, than to give in oneself.
Of course it was a terrible wrong, and that is the sine qua non of discussing it. But I sometimes wonder if people are honest about exactly why it was wrong. For instance, it was not wrong because of something called racism. Racism is not a condition of its being wrong. It was not wrong because there was a mismatch between the people and the work. The people were stronger and more able to tolerate the work. But it was obviously a great sin to jump from this recognition - historical contingency if you like - to the idea that people should be kidnapped and wrenched from their own continent (!) to do this work. So another way besides this violation of people's sovereignty, again not a new thing in history - another underrated way it was wrong was because of greed. Greed is not good. But I read a lot that greed is good - in the business section! In my father's old Forbes and Fortune magazines! On any econ blog! They could have paid them to come and work. Many might have volunteered depending on how things were going in their places of origin. And it was wrong in a way that is less often mentioned: it is always wrong - a failing, and really a moral failing - to make others do your work for you. And in just that one strand of it, the principal reason it is wrong is not the damage to them, but the damage to yourself, to your society, your soul if you like. This latter point I think I do not need to belabor, in America in 2023. Or do I?
A final way I think it is "wrongly seen as wrong" is this idea that we can never recover from it. It shouldn't have happened, but it did happen - and while it is ridiculous to make it the whole identity of the country, it is a major contributor to the country, the people we are. And beyond that - some very interesting cultural ferment has happened via this contact between black and white on this soil. I would find it strange, like denying the atmosphere of my youth, like denying really my country and any attachment to it - to affirm with others that slavery was a *permanent* curse and rare ill wind that indeed blew no good, ever and ever - and moreover that there has been no good and no humanity since it ended.
That is a very radical and dangerous idea, and very much treads all over the idea of the personal and private which should be the conservative's first concern.
If ancestry or place or birth were mere accidents with no salient real world impact that it would be unjust to prevent freedom of movement.
However, those things are salient and there are important difference between groups that map fairly well onto ancestry and place of birth.
This whole analysis is shallow. "People once had slaves, therefore we should support all radical politics that sounds good and not worry about the consequences."
The argument for abolishing slavery did not depend upon the premise that there were no salient differences between enslaved groups and others, or that there would be no practical downsides for anyone from abolition. The abolitionists argued that those differences and costs, even if they were significant, could not justify the overwhelming moral monstrosity of slavery. Principled open borders advocates today argue the same.
IIRC most abolitionists had no use for blacks and planned to resettle them back in Africa, where they would be safe from being eliminated by competition from whites. Liberia is the remnant of this effort.
I agree with you about slavery, I just don't see the relevance to modern immigration law. I don't consider modern immigration law monstrous, and I don't think turning the entire world into a third world shit hole would be a moral good.
Even in the case of slavery we tolerate it now. Our Gulf State "allies" engage in a slavery like system with migrant workers. The minerals for our cell phones get mined by slaves in Congo and elsewhere. Sex slavery is very common.
We do nothing about any of this, and I'm glad we don't. I don't want to invade the Congo to try and stop slavery for instance.
I don't think those open borders advocates have shown their work as regards why the world's population increased by 6 billion people over the last hundred years. What were the causes of that? Who were the causes of that? What if people are not fungible? What if the people who were the principal agents of that, got on a spaceship and went away, what would happen to everybody left behind? Would it be all good, or would it possibly lead to a few moral monstrosities (not meaning to suggest any of those moral monstrosities could ever compete with the moral monstrosity of people being born somewhere upon the face of the earth).
Conservatism was easier to define back when its principles could rest on religious assumptions. For example, Russell Kirk defined it around natural law. The challenge comes in identifying a philosophical system to replace the foundational virtue and wisdom that come from religion, in an objective way but without the God stuff. So far this effort has failed, and the variety of competing philosophical systems blowing on the wind have fatally splintered Conservatism.
James Q. Wilson's 'The Moral Sense' about 25 or so years ago made pretty good arguments about morality being rooted in evolutionary biology. I was quite persuaded/influenced by his thoughts.
The trouble is that, as Hayek noted, evo-psych morality is hard to reconcile with the institutional engines of prosperity such as private property, market capitalism, hierarchic organizations, etc.
Leftist ideology can be defined as an evolving downstream solution to the problem of how best to capitalize politically on such emotional impulses.
"The Right" is just as easily definable as the attempt to keep those self-destructive and counter-productive impulses reigned in, via maintenance of strong cultural institutions dedicated to doing so.
In the endless fight over cultural morality, the left always has these winds in its sails, while the right is always pushing a boulder uphill. It's not a fair fight, so, well, look around, this is what happens.
"Trial and error" presumes society can agree on what are errors. To identify deviations from the target, one must have a target. Americans like to talk and argue a lot about ideals. Ideals are not targets. Ideals cannot be directly measured. Rather a proxy for the ideal is needed and little effort is made to agree on what these proxies are.
In the past decade especially, great changes have been made in policies related to drug use and to discipline in the public schools. The Conservative / Traditionalist instinctively knew these changes would create undesirable consequences. The Progressives believed these changed would help solve the problems of inequity and improve social justice. Libertarians seemed to only care that they could do more of of what they want with less interference from the State.
I am not aware of anyone saying at the time that drugs were decriminalized and school discipline eliminated that this was a "Trial" and certain datapoints would be monitored and adjustments would be made. Rather, the changes were made with such great enthusiasm that those in charge were not considering the changes would fail. Same thing happened with Covid policies. There was no doubting by those pushing massive disruptions on society that the disruptions were good and needed. The skeptics were ignored and literally shutout of the conversation.
The Traditionalist would say "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread". That phrase doesn't solve the question of what policies should be pursued, but it does suggest that policymakers should have some humility. The most basic expression of humility being the willingness to admit that the pursuit of a goal may create undesirable effects and those effects must be monitored. It would be a big step forward in American government if the people running things could simply agree to measure the costs and benefits of policy and stand accountable for both the good and the bad. Would that be a Conservative success? It would be a credit to common sense.
The only error that the left appears to be concerned about, in the whole universe of things that have/might/are happening - is the imagined, and greatly magnified in their imagination, consequence that confirms their initial certainty and that they call "backlash".
1) The Palestinians would be better off being ruled by the Jews.
2) There is nothing in it for the Jews.
3) Ruling over a huge group of second class citizens that don't have the franchise in a democracy is a highly unstable equilibrium.
4) The Palestinians ruling over the Jews, which would happen in a One State Democratic Solution, would be a catastrophe.
Israel is running into the same problem every single western government is going to run into.
You can't integrate low IQ peoples from the Global South into western liberal democracy.
It worked fine enough with whites, asians, and Jews, but it won't work with low IQ brown people.
The higher a % of the population these groups become, the more of a problem it becomes, and when they become a majority its existential. That's the problem Israel has faced for a long time, but everyone will face it eventually.
Breaking down the ethno-nationalist state was a good thing when it means Germans and Italians living together in Switzerland or whatever. It's nice that the French and the Germans aren't slaughtering each other once every generation or two. But this logic simply can't be applied to the Global South.
The proper solution is that the Global South be given self determination. The west be completely uninvolved other than buying their raw materials at market prices. We build a big wall to keep them out. Whatever happens to them happens to them.
This solution is a bit harder for Israel because it doesn't have Oceans and Distance to provide natural barriers, but it will just have to find a way.
“Why would women have evolved to give birth too late?” There were no ‘experts’ telling them what Nature ‘should’ be doing?
However, plenty of reasons. Increased fœtal development, particularly the lungs, mother’s lactation rate more developed, therefore better chance of neonatal survival.
Yea, I suspect the optimal time is very woman dependent as well. There is probably an average time, but there are no average women. A bit like how the average normal human body temperature is 98.6, but in reality people have a fair bit of dispersion around that number.
"On these teams, a police officer and a mental-health clinician respond to calls involving mental- and behavioral-health issues. Co-responder programs free up police resources,"
Of course it ties up mental and behavioral health resources, but I suppose mandating more of those in general is the goal here. Or Jillian just doesn't understand how costs work and so can't understand that you still would have to hire more people, regardless of their title. Which one is more charitable?
No one would advocate more strongly against the idea of mental health workers accompanying the police on these incidents than the mental health workers themselves a whole two weeks after realizing what it means to have to regularly involve themselves with such incidents.
"You know how the police now have body-cameras? Yeah, can we now also get them body-screens too? I propose that from now on, I accompany the police ... via zoom. Ok? Please?"
When "defund the police" started getting repeated, the question would be asked in interviews, "If there are no police, what do you do when someone is breaking into your home?" and the activist would dissemble and mumble something about the need to understand the historical context and trying to provide the burglar with the help he needed and other such nonsense. And the response was the cutting joke, "Help! Somebody call a social worker!"
For generations, public intellectuals have been trying to propose countless alternatives to "police using physical force" to deal with crazy people about whom little can be known when a call comes in except that they seem to be posing a danger to themselves and others in public, making people "feel unsafe", you could say.
After all, when it's not merely emergency medical response to someone in bad shape, that's why most calls are made, people feel unsafe, and they are calling on the entity authorized to restore public safety in unsafe circumstances, designated for that purpose, and trained and resourced to be cable of doing it, even on the rare occasion when you can't just talk some crazy huge guy out of bashing everything in sight with a few choice tender words of sympathy and kindness and conversation about his troubled childhood and relationship problems.
You can deal with crazy people in public, but only with the police. You can deal with crazy people without the police, but only in an institution.
I think some degree specialization makes sense. Different skills are needed to deal with public urination, speeding, and armed robbery. But some skills overlap. It's a management problem how to allocate the resources. Maybe they all should be called "police" maybe some by some other name.
I think everything you say is pretty much true, but combining what I know about how many more psychology/social work graduates there are every year compared to how many such jobs there are in the US with how strange it is to focus on relieving strain on police resources makes me think someone got the bright idea that partnering cops and social workers would be a great jobs program for all those unemployed college grads.
In reality, I think it would last for about a week before all those social worker types went "Wait, this happens EVERY DAY?!" and noped right out :D
Good point. I was assuming they would be paid less than the police officers, the resource we are told this would relieve pressure on, but that is by no means necessary, even though if social workers are paid more it makes sense to hire more police.
Whenever this happens - the police shoot or otherwise get in a kerfuffle resulting in death (sometimes a vehicle is involved) with the deranged person who appears to threaten, himself or herself or the relative or the cops - there is a mention that police were called to the house (by the relatives) 30, fifty, over a hundred times!
But quickly they miss the loved one so much, they miss him $10 million worth.
A 39 week induction may be optimal for survivability but there is a trade off that needs to be factored in. There is now fairly robust evidence that foetal brain development continues between weeks 39 and 40, which shows up in many different studies and in different manifestations.
My wife and I were being pushed to do a 39 week induction despite no specific indications it was necessary and we opted to wait to 40 for the reason noted above. The view we took was that yes you risk a higher chance of mortality (or something less severe) but even a few extra IQ points can play an enormous role in overall quality of life.
Orr: “My libertarian inclination is to believe that progress comes from trial and error, whereas liberals and socialists think that it comes from elite wisdom.”
I can’t speak for Socialist but I see Liberals willing to do trial and error with policy, although I’ll grant that they ought to be more cautious with their trials and more willing to let go of their errors.
Friedman: “He says that we get into philosophical and real-world trouble when we think of the rights of “a people” rather than a person.”
Theoretically, yes. The aggregation of persons into a “people” is arbitrary. But in practice rights get exercised in a collective. We can’t do can opener political science.
It seems to me that we need to introduce a 'levels of selection' concept into this to make any progress. There are more 'levels' of human organization than just individuals and the global masses, and nationalism is only one, not even the most important one necessarily. The lack of this concept made a hash of evolutionary biology that Dawkins took to a logical extreme with 'the selfish gene' in which he attempted the 'libertarian' trick of reducing everything to selection on individual genes. It didn't really work, but it highlighted the conundrum and eventually helped solve the group selection problem by putting that into a larger context. It takes massive, unjustifiable amounts of force based on unreasonably small amounts of knowledge for people in one group to impose perfect justice inside of another group. It's less of a problem when the group is nested inside a larger group, there is a 'reach' up and down. The smallest groups can self-organize best in some regards; worst in others. This little comment doesn't scratch the necessary exploration of the topic; but I hope it raises the concepts required to start a fruitful discussion.
Starting with the assumption that conservatism should be defined first and foremost - if at all - as a political scheme or credo - is odd to me, and seems to cede too much to his opponent from the get-go.
I mean, for starters, the cautious would never assume that variety in say, governing entities, was not advantageous in the manner of biodiversity, any more than a monoculture is nature's most common arrangement.
It's like when I read about stone age people in the jungle. I don't think - leave them alone because they have "rights". Or leave them alone because I want to go hang out with them and live a pre-modern life. Or, leave them alone because they are noble and beautiful (interesting to be sure, and I do hate how the world has become steadily less interesting over my life). No, I think, this is a way of living, that we ought to want to keep around because you never know, people might need this knowledge. Anyway, don't put all your eggs in one basket ... Homogenization is a loss of information, and possibly a loss of something greater for the whole though I don't know how to put it into words.
And, of course, how small, of all that human hearts endure, &etc.
>> [W]en libertarians are impatient with trial and error and propose radical, utopian ideas (open borders, legalize all drugs) that they deservedly lose those of us with a conservative bent.
The state-by-state spread of marijuana legalization seems like a great example of the superiority of a radical idea successfully being tempered. So did the middle days of gay marriage: those few years between when some state initiatives and courts started allowing the practice but before the Supreme Court imposed if from above were bright ones.
My wife was induced at the 37/38 week mark in each of our pregnancies. This was due to her having a rare condition that causes a very high rate of stillborn late in the pregnancy.
In my experience doctors and hospitals like the rush the process. Time is money after all. And it's clear that doctors personal schedules have an impact on these decisions. It's been commented many times that the rise in C-Sections can't possibly have a medical cause.
I think people do it to clarify relationship to and ownership of the pregnancy, commitment to the process. There was perhaps a time when one heard "my wife is pregnant" and could assume paternity and an assumption of responsibility for the process and resulting kid. Nowadays... maybe not so much.
Henderson: One can see how fighting and winning would be positively selected, but bad for society. But channeled into winning games against nature,#1 becomes #2.
Are we sure inducing labor early doesn't have more to do with the financial incentives faced by the OB's rather than with changing standards of care? "It's not going to hurt the baby any, really, to be born a week or too early, and we get paid $2500 for each day he spends in the NICU, so...."
There is only the most tenuous connection between an OBs financial incentives and anything that happens after delivery. Health care financials are very very siloed.
I get that colonial rule might be on average more peaceful, viable, productive, etc. and that even when self rule is democratic one might be part of a hypothetical 49% but I'm lost as to what his point is.
The abolition of chattel slavery was once a radical, utopian idea. William Lloyd Garrison and Lysander Spooner, among others, thought and spoke about it in radical, principles-based ways that are to a considerable degree forerunners of radical libertarian thought today. It seems to me that if you are going to dismiss principled, unpopular libertarian convictions like "people should not be subject to arbitrary restrictions on their freedom of movement based on the accident of their ancestry or place of birth," or "people rightfully own their own bodies and therefore have the right to put what substances they please into them," you have to explain what makes those so different from the once-unpopular conviction that it is a terrible wrong for one person to own another.
I would also push back on the idea of its being a radical, utopian idea. Jefferson understood it to be a moral depravity - Jefferson who is the virtual face of slave ownership in America! The radical abolitionists certainly aided in ensuring a penalty would be paid in blood, and I think that is as much why they are honored, as any curious notion that they came up with the idea that slavery was wrong. They are the direct forebears of Yankee progressives who also like to make things happen.
Fair. But understanding something to be depraved or desirable is pretty far, in my mind, from committing to actually move toward its abolition or achievement. The universal, borderless brotherhood of man is an old enough idea at this point to have made it into the classical canon-- I just sang in the chorus for a wonderful performance of Beethoven's 9th Symphony, with Schiller's words from 1785 ringing out "Alle Menschen werden Brüder wo dein sanfter Flügel weilt"-- but those active in its practical realization remain few.
An easy way to divine what people feel is most significant about something, is to raise the subject of whether slavery was not likely to survive much longer and the Civil War could have been avoided. I am not well versed enough in history to even have an opinion on the subject, but that's not the point. You will find that people react very strongly with horror and suspicion to the idea. This gets at the seemingly necessary punitive aspect of radicalism, and it somewhat blurs the line of virtue - between say a Jefferson, who saw (to some degree) his own complicity in wrong, and an abolitionist - or what you might call the abolitionist's present-day heir.
I think enslavement coud have persisted in the South anchored by plantation agriculture for many decades more. That's not to say that it coud have been worked in the new states that were being admitted. Probably both North and South were wrong to fight over the extension of enslavement.
Could slavery have been abolished without the Civil War?
Yes
Was it?
No
Whose Fault Was That?
I mostly blame the Southern Planter Class.
They should have accepted the nature of their situation. Instead they seem to have taken the moral critiques of their way of life too personally.
It wasn't enough to say that they had a good personal thing going that would last for a certain while (Jefferson, Washington). No, slavery had to be an absolute positive good. It was a GOOD THING they had slaves. And it was a GOOD THING that it be expanded all the way to the Pacific Ocean. And maybe down into Mexico through wars of conquest. And the northerners should aid in their slavery via the fugitive slave act, etc.
A review of the pre-civil war era clearly shows Southern Slave Power as the primary antagonists. It didn't have to be that way, but that's how it was.
Could the abolitionist side have performed better?
Sure, I think keeping Virginia (and thus North Carolina) in the Union might have been possible with better action by Lincoln during the secession crisis. That was a tragedy. Still, at least he understood keeping the border states in was pivotal (unlike the pure abolitionists, who probably would have lost them all at the beginning of the war).
> They should have accepted the nature of their situation. Instead they seem to have taken the moral critiques of their way of life too personally.
They were men, and pugnacious, mettlesome men at that. _You_ did not accept the nature of your situation when aboli... public health authorities came down on your public school district to force your small children to wear masks all day, wielding moral critiques of your maskless way of life ("how dare you endanger abstract grandma through what we in our boundless and unassailable wisdom declare to be dangerous behavior?") But it is always easier in such cases to advise others to give in, than to give in oneself.
Maybe because the Jena set tended to actively demonstrate within their own circle, its impracticality.
Of course it was a terrible wrong, and that is the sine qua non of discussing it. But I sometimes wonder if people are honest about exactly why it was wrong. For instance, it was not wrong because of something called racism. Racism is not a condition of its being wrong. It was not wrong because there was a mismatch between the people and the work. The people were stronger and more able to tolerate the work. But it was obviously a great sin to jump from this recognition - historical contingency if you like - to the idea that people should be kidnapped and wrenched from their own continent (!) to do this work. So another way besides this violation of people's sovereignty, again not a new thing in history - another underrated way it was wrong was because of greed. Greed is not good. But I read a lot that greed is good - in the business section! In my father's old Forbes and Fortune magazines! On any econ blog! They could have paid them to come and work. Many might have volunteered depending on how things were going in their places of origin. And it was wrong in a way that is less often mentioned: it is always wrong - a failing, and really a moral failing - to make others do your work for you. And in just that one strand of it, the principal reason it is wrong is not the damage to them, but the damage to yourself, to your society, your soul if you like. This latter point I think I do not need to belabor, in America in 2023. Or do I?
A final way I think it is "wrongly seen as wrong" is this idea that we can never recover from it. It shouldn't have happened, but it did happen - and while it is ridiculous to make it the whole identity of the country, it is a major contributor to the country, the people we are. And beyond that - some very interesting cultural ferment has happened via this contact between black and white on this soil. I would find it strange, like denying the atmosphere of my youth, like denying really my country and any attachment to it - to affirm with others that slavery was a *permanent* curse and rare ill wind that indeed blew no good, ever and ever - and moreover that there has been no good and no humanity since it ended.
That is a very radical and dangerous idea, and very much treads all over the idea of the personal and private which should be the conservative's first concern.
If ancestry or place or birth were mere accidents with no salient real world impact that it would be unjust to prevent freedom of movement.
However, those things are salient and there are important difference between groups that map fairly well onto ancestry and place of birth.
This whole analysis is shallow. "People once had slaves, therefore we should support all radical politics that sounds good and not worry about the consequences."
The argument for abolishing slavery did not depend upon the premise that there were no salient differences between enslaved groups and others, or that there would be no practical downsides for anyone from abolition. The abolitionists argued that those differences and costs, even if they were significant, could not justify the overwhelming moral monstrosity of slavery. Principled open borders advocates today argue the same.
IIRC most abolitionists had no use for blacks and planned to resettle them back in Africa, where they would be safe from being eliminated by competition from whites. Liberia is the remnant of this effort.
I agree with you about slavery, I just don't see the relevance to modern immigration law. I don't consider modern immigration law monstrous, and I don't think turning the entire world into a third world shit hole would be a moral good.
Even in the case of slavery we tolerate it now. Our Gulf State "allies" engage in a slavery like system with migrant workers. The minerals for our cell phones get mined by slaves in Congo and elsewhere. Sex slavery is very common.
We do nothing about any of this, and I'm glad we don't. I don't want to invade the Congo to try and stop slavery for instance.
I don't think those open borders advocates have shown their work as regards why the world's population increased by 6 billion people over the last hundred years. What were the causes of that? Who were the causes of that? What if people are not fungible? What if the people who were the principal agents of that, got on a spaceship and went away, what would happen to everybody left behind? Would it be all good, or would it possibly lead to a few moral monstrosities (not meaning to suggest any of those moral monstrosities could ever compete with the moral monstrosity of people being born somewhere upon the face of the earth).
Conservatism was easier to define back when its principles could rest on religious assumptions. For example, Russell Kirk defined it around natural law. The challenge comes in identifying a philosophical system to replace the foundational virtue and wisdom that come from religion, in an objective way but without the God stuff. So far this effort has failed, and the variety of competing philosophical systems blowing on the wind have fatally splintered Conservatism.
James Q. Wilson's 'The Moral Sense' about 25 or so years ago made pretty good arguments about morality being rooted in evolutionary biology. I was quite persuaded/influenced by his thoughts.
The trouble is that, as Hayek noted, evo-psych morality is hard to reconcile with the institutional engines of prosperity such as private property, market capitalism, hierarchic organizations, etc.
Leftist ideology can be defined as an evolving downstream solution to the problem of how best to capitalize politically on such emotional impulses.
"The Right" is just as easily definable as the attempt to keep those self-destructive and counter-productive impulses reigned in, via maintenance of strong cultural institutions dedicated to doing so.
In the endless fight over cultural morality, the left always has these winds in its sails, while the right is always pushing a boulder uphill. It's not a fair fight, so, well, look around, this is what happens.
What is the Hayek reference?
I am thinking mostly of "The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism" but IIRC he touched on the subject as well in "The Constitution of Liberty".
"Trial and error" presumes society can agree on what are errors. To identify deviations from the target, one must have a target. Americans like to talk and argue a lot about ideals. Ideals are not targets. Ideals cannot be directly measured. Rather a proxy for the ideal is needed and little effort is made to agree on what these proxies are.
In the past decade especially, great changes have been made in policies related to drug use and to discipline in the public schools. The Conservative / Traditionalist instinctively knew these changes would create undesirable consequences. The Progressives believed these changed would help solve the problems of inequity and improve social justice. Libertarians seemed to only care that they could do more of of what they want with less interference from the State.
I am not aware of anyone saying at the time that drugs were decriminalized and school discipline eliminated that this was a "Trial" and certain datapoints would be monitored and adjustments would be made. Rather, the changes were made with such great enthusiasm that those in charge were not considering the changes would fail. Same thing happened with Covid policies. There was no doubting by those pushing massive disruptions on society that the disruptions were good and needed. The skeptics were ignored and literally shutout of the conversation.
The Traditionalist would say "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread". That phrase doesn't solve the question of what policies should be pursued, but it does suggest that policymakers should have some humility. The most basic expression of humility being the willingness to admit that the pursuit of a goal may create undesirable effects and those effects must be monitored. It would be a big step forward in American government if the people running things could simply agree to measure the costs and benefits of policy and stand accountable for both the good and the bad. Would that be a Conservative success? It would be a credit to common sense.
The only error that the left appears to be concerned about, in the whole universe of things that have/might/are happening - is the imagined, and greatly magnified in their imagination, consequence that confirms their initial certainty and that they call "backlash".
1) The Palestinians would be better off being ruled by the Jews.
2) There is nothing in it for the Jews.
3) Ruling over a huge group of second class citizens that don't have the franchise in a democracy is a highly unstable equilibrium.
4) The Palestinians ruling over the Jews, which would happen in a One State Democratic Solution, would be a catastrophe.
Israel is running into the same problem every single western government is going to run into.
You can't integrate low IQ peoples from the Global South into western liberal democracy.
It worked fine enough with whites, asians, and Jews, but it won't work with low IQ brown people.
The higher a % of the population these groups become, the more of a problem it becomes, and when they become a majority its existential. That's the problem Israel has faced for a long time, but everyone will face it eventually.
Breaking down the ethno-nationalist state was a good thing when it means Germans and Italians living together in Switzerland or whatever. It's nice that the French and the Germans aren't slaughtering each other once every generation or two. But this logic simply can't be applied to the Global South.
The proper solution is that the Global South be given self determination. The west be completely uninvolved other than buying their raw materials at market prices. We build a big wall to keep them out. Whatever happens to them happens to them.
This solution is a bit harder for Israel because it doesn't have Oceans and Distance to provide natural barriers, but it will just have to find a way.
“Why would women have evolved to give birth too late?” There were no ‘experts’ telling them what Nature ‘should’ be doing?
However, plenty of reasons. Increased fœtal development, particularly the lungs, mother’s lactation rate more developed, therefore better chance of neonatal survival.
Yea, I suspect the optimal time is very woman dependent as well. There is probably an average time, but there are no average women. A bit like how the average normal human body temperature is 98.6, but in reality people have a fair bit of dispersion around that number.
Quite right. It depends on nutrition, whether first baby or not, other environmental conditions and personal circumstances.
"On these teams, a police officer and a mental-health clinician respond to calls involving mental- and behavioral-health issues. Co-responder programs free up police resources,"
Of course it ties up mental and behavioral health resources, but I suppose mandating more of those in general is the goal here. Or Jillian just doesn't understand how costs work and so can't understand that you still would have to hire more people, regardless of their title. Which one is more charitable?
No one would advocate more strongly against the idea of mental health workers accompanying the police on these incidents than the mental health workers themselves a whole two weeks after realizing what it means to have to regularly involve themselves with such incidents.
"You know how the police now have body-cameras? Yeah, can we now also get them body-screens too? I propose that from now on, I accompany the police ... via zoom. Ok? Please?"
When "defund the police" started getting repeated, the question would be asked in interviews, "If there are no police, what do you do when someone is breaking into your home?" and the activist would dissemble and mumble something about the need to understand the historical context and trying to provide the burglar with the help he needed and other such nonsense. And the response was the cutting joke, "Help! Somebody call a social worker!"
For generations, public intellectuals have been trying to propose countless alternatives to "police using physical force" to deal with crazy people about whom little can be known when a call comes in except that they seem to be posing a danger to themselves and others in public, making people "feel unsafe", you could say.
After all, when it's not merely emergency medical response to someone in bad shape, that's why most calls are made, people feel unsafe, and they are calling on the entity authorized to restore public safety in unsafe circumstances, designated for that purpose, and trained and resourced to be cable of doing it, even on the rare occasion when you can't just talk some crazy huge guy out of bashing everything in sight with a few choice tender words of sympathy and kindness and conversation about his troubled childhood and relationship problems.
You can deal with crazy people in public, but only with the police. You can deal with crazy people without the police, but only in an institution.
I think some degree specialization makes sense. Different skills are needed to deal with public urination, speeding, and armed robbery. But some skills overlap. It's a management problem how to allocate the resources. Maybe they all should be called "police" maybe some by some other name.
I think everything you say is pretty much true, but combining what I know about how many more psychology/social work graduates there are every year compared to how many such jobs there are in the US with how strange it is to focus on relieving strain on police resources makes me think someone got the bright idea that partnering cops and social workers would be a great jobs program for all those unemployed college grads.
In reality, I think it would last for about a week before all those social worker types went "Wait, this happens EVERY DAY?!" and noped right out :D
Might depend on the pay.
Good point. I was assuming they would be paid less than the police officers, the resource we are told this would relieve pressure on, but that is by no means necessary, even though if social workers are paid more it makes sense to hire more police.
Whenever this happens - the police shoot or otherwise get in a kerfuffle resulting in death (sometimes a vehicle is involved) with the deranged person who appears to threaten, himself or herself or the relative or the cops - there is a mention that police were called to the house (by the relatives) 30, fifty, over a hundred times!
But quickly they miss the loved one so much, they miss him $10 million worth.
Almost starting to be a moral hazard there.
A 39 week induction may be optimal for survivability but there is a trade off that needs to be factored in. There is now fairly robust evidence that foetal brain development continues between weeks 39 and 40, which shows up in many different studies and in different manifestations.
My wife and I were being pushed to do a 39 week induction despite no specific indications it was necessary and we opted to wait to 40 for the reason noted above. The view we took was that yes you risk a higher chance of mortality (or something less severe) but even a few extra IQ points can play an enormous role in overall quality of life.
Orr: “My libertarian inclination is to believe that progress comes from trial and error, whereas liberals and socialists think that it comes from elite wisdom.”
I can’t speak for Socialist but I see Liberals willing to do trial and error with policy, although I’ll grant that they ought to be more cautious with their trials and more willing to let go of their errors.
Friedman: “He says that we get into philosophical and real-world trouble when we think of the rights of “a people” rather than a person.”
Theoretically, yes. The aggregation of persons into a “people” is arbitrary. But in practice rights get exercised in a collective. We can’t do can opener political science.
It seems to me that we need to introduce a 'levels of selection' concept into this to make any progress. There are more 'levels' of human organization than just individuals and the global masses, and nationalism is only one, not even the most important one necessarily. The lack of this concept made a hash of evolutionary biology that Dawkins took to a logical extreme with 'the selfish gene' in which he attempted the 'libertarian' trick of reducing everything to selection on individual genes. It didn't really work, but it highlighted the conundrum and eventually helped solve the group selection problem by putting that into a larger context. It takes massive, unjustifiable amounts of force based on unreasonably small amounts of knowledge for people in one group to impose perfect justice inside of another group. It's less of a problem when the group is nested inside a larger group, there is a 'reach' up and down. The smallest groups can self-organize best in some regards; worst in others. This little comment doesn't scratch the necessary exploration of the topic; but I hope it raises the concepts required to start a fruitful discussion.
Starting with the assumption that conservatism should be defined first and foremost - if at all - as a political scheme or credo - is odd to me, and seems to cede too much to his opponent from the get-go.
I mean, for starters, the cautious would never assume that variety in say, governing entities, was not advantageous in the manner of biodiversity, any more than a monoculture is nature's most common arrangement.
It's like when I read about stone age people in the jungle. I don't think - leave them alone because they have "rights". Or leave them alone because I want to go hang out with them and live a pre-modern life. Or, leave them alone because they are noble and beautiful (interesting to be sure, and I do hate how the world has become steadily less interesting over my life). No, I think, this is a way of living, that we ought to want to keep around because you never know, people might need this knowledge. Anyway, don't put all your eggs in one basket ... Homogenization is a loss of information, and possibly a loss of something greater for the whole though I don't know how to put it into words.
And, of course, how small, of all that human hearts endure, &etc.
I do like the essay's emphasis on contingency. I mean, contingency is pretty much everything, all the time.
>> [W]en libertarians are impatient with trial and error and propose radical, utopian ideas (open borders, legalize all drugs) that they deservedly lose those of us with a conservative bent.
The state-by-state spread of marijuana legalization seems like a great example of the superiority of a radical idea successfully being tempered. So did the middle days of gay marriage: those few years between when some state initiatives and courts started allowing the practice but before the Supreme Court imposed if from above were bright ones.
My wife was induced at the 37/38 week mark in each of our pregnancies. This was due to her having a rare condition that causes a very high rate of stillborn late in the pregnancy.
In my experience doctors and hospitals like the rush the process. Time is money after all. And it's clear that doctors personal schedules have an impact on these decisions. It's been commented many times that the rise in C-Sections can't possibly have a medical cause.
I don't know when that became the norm, but it doesn't seem weird to me. Some men feel 50% responsible for a pregnancy—not unreasonably.
I think people do it to clarify relationship to and ownership of the pregnancy, commitment to the process. There was perhaps a time when one heard "my wife is pregnant" and could assume paternity and an assumption of responsibility for the process and resulting kid. Nowadays... maybe not so much.
Henderson: One can see how fighting and winning would be positively selected, but bad for society. But channeled into winning games against nature,#1 becomes #2.
Are we sure inducing labor early doesn't have more to do with the financial incentives faced by the OB's rather than with changing standards of care? "It's not going to hurt the baby any, really, to be born a week or too early, and we get paid $2500 for each day he spends in the NICU, so...."
There is only the most tenuous connection between an OBs financial incentives and anything that happens after delivery. Health care financials are very very siloed.
Okay, change "OBs" to "hospital administrators." Does that give you a different answer?
I get that colonial rule might be on average more peaceful, viable, productive, etc. and that even when self rule is democratic one might be part of a hypothetical 49% but I'm lost as to what his point is.
There have been no RCT's
Lol