The most fateful words

When it comes to public policy debates, there is a phrase that I have been taught by bitter experience to fear, especially in my beloved home state of West Virginia. Every time I hear them, I almost break out in chills. The words in question:

It's a no brainer.

HILLARY TALKS WV. Specifically, she spoke about the Reconnecting McDowell project at a gathering in  Chicago. One wonders what this signals.

IF IT'S FRIDAY, it's time for Krugman.

DO YOU THINK YOUR LIFE IS WEIRD? Check out the life cycles of these critters.

BLACK HISTORY/WEST VIRGINIA HISTORY. If you're in or around Charleston June 16-19, check out these events celebrating Black History as we lead up to WV's 150th.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Conscience and power

Reinhold Niebuhr's Moral Man and Immoral Society is a masterpiece of anti-utopianism. The book, like much of his other work, is an extended polemic against naive and overly optimistic views of human nature and society.

While he doesn't hold to the idea of the "total depravity" of humanity, he takes the idea of sin very seriously. By sin, he doesn't mean disobeying this or that divine rule but rather the self-centeredness which causes people to do harm to others, the creation and even themselves. And if individual humans have sinful tendencies, groups are much more selfish and imperialistic.

He also argued that human motivations are inherently ambiguous and people often do the most harm when they think they are being the most righteous. Oppressors often quite sincerely believe that they are acting for the good of those they oppress--and some of the oppressed might do the same given the chance.

If that's the case, then while we might make this or that social improvement, society will always be an arena of struggle:

there is good reason to believe that the sentiments of benevolence and social goodwill will never be so pure and powerful, and the rational capacity to consider the rights and needs of others in fair competition with our own will never be so fully developed as to create the possibility for the anarchistic millennium...

While democracy represents a great advance over other forms of government, it still doesn't and can't eliminate the element of struggle:

Politics will, to the end of history, be an area where conscience and power meet, where the ethical and coercive factors of human life will interpenetrate and work out their tentative and uneasy compromises.

EASY STREET. Here's economist Dean Baker's latest rant on Wall Street.

ONE TO WATCH. WV Governor Joe Manchin has issued a call for a special session of the legislature to convene today. One item is health care related in the wake of national health care reform. The most contentious issues are those related to education.

CLIMATE. Here's some coverage of the new energy/climate bill that has just been introduced in the US Senate.

ONE SHOT DEAL. There's more scientific evidence that life on earth arose exactly once and that all living things have a single common ancestor.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

Nature and nurture: the rematch

Jean-Jacques Rousseau tended to blame human ills on social corruption.

One of these days, I want to go on a long blogging jag about the dangerous territory where biology and society overlap. I call it dangerous territory because many earlier efforts to go there have led to bad results in various forms of social Darwinism. On the other hand, a great deal of harm has been done by those who deny that we have any kind of biological human nature and view people as blanks slates.

In fact, I'd say that both the right and left are prone errors on this question. Conservatives tend to see hierarchy and systemic inequality (the old Great Chain of Being) built into nature itself, thus making it impossible to do anything about it. Some on the left in the past have denied that there is such a thing as human nature and viewed all negative human traits to be due to bad social conditions--and the results of acting on this belief have been pretty bad.

It seems to me that there is a growing body of evidence that we do carry around some evolutionary baggage which probably made sense for a lot of human history but can cause problems now. Some of that baggage might include a tendency towards binary in-group/out-group views; kin favoritism; striving for status, particularly among males; the capacity for aggression; and so on.

That doesn't mean we're fated to any given kind of social arrangement. It just means we have to work with the materials at hand. Human nature isn't some kind of Silly Putty that can be molded into any conceivable shape, but it is remarkably adaptable.

WALL STREET ON THE MOON. The Dow is up while millions of Americans are down. Here's Robert Reich on the subject.

WHICH IS WHY it's a good thing the US House voted again to extend unemployment benefits for 13 weeks.

THE COST OF DOING NOTHING about health care is too high, as this op-ed argues.

TORTURE ON THE BRAIN. Brain research reinforces the widely held conclusion that torture does not lead to reliable information, aside from the whole moral repugnance factor.

URGENT WEIRD SHARK UPDATE here. (Teaser: it looks like this kind is into kinky sex.)

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: ELEVATED

A NATURALIST'S TALE AND (WHY NOT?) AN ITEM ABOUT THE LOCH NESS MONSTER ((and the WV Supreme Court))

Caption: Can you find the ants in this picture? E. O. Wilson could.

This has inadvertently turned into Darwin week at Goat Rope so I may as well stay the course and recommend a good but not terribly recent book, Edward O. Wilson's 1995 autobiography Naturalist.

While El Cabrero was never a huge fan of sociobiology, one of Wilson's many brainchildren, it's hard not to like Wilson himself (no known relation). Before and after he moved into evolutionary grand theory, he was--and remains--a naturalist's naturalist, turning over rocks and logs in search of nature's wonders.

And he has become a real leader among scientists in defending the environment, recently calling for Christians to join the fight to preserve the natural world.

Wilson ignited quite a controversy in the 1970s with his suggestions that genes influence human society to a degree largely unimagined. He was attacked--sometimes unfairly--for promoting an ideology which some said could justify inequality, male dominance, xenophobia, war, etc.

In fact, he didn't believe biology was destiny and was not much of a political animal, describing himself as a "Roosevelt liberal turned pragmatic centrist." One could do worse--much worse.

The debate over the role of biology in social life is destined to go on for a long time, but his other contributions both to natural science and protecting the environment are beyond question.

Here's sample from Naturalist about his beloved ants:

They are everywhere, dark and ruddy specks that zigzag across the ground and down holes, milligram-weight inhabitants of an alien civilization who hide their daily rounds from our eyes. For over 50 million years ants have been the overwhelmingly dominant insect everywhere on land outside the polar and arctic ice fields. By my estimate, between 1 and 10 million billion individuals are alive at any moment, all of them together weighing, to the nearest order of magnitude, as much as the totality of human beings.

He left out the part about them getting in your pants and making you dance, but otherwise the book is a keeper.

DROPPING ALL PRETENCE OF SOCIAL RELEVANCE, Goat Rope is sticking to the theme of weirdness this week. In case you missed it, here's a recent item on a possible sighting of the Loch Ness monster, complete with a video clip. After more than 6 years of the Bush administration, nothing seems weird to me anymore...

WHATEVER... This is inside baseball for West Virginians. The masterful "just-the-facts" blog of all things pertaining to El Cabrero's beloved state is Lincoln Walks at Midnight, which has this item about state Supreme Court justice Brent Benjamin in which he claims that he won in 2004 not because of coal baron and Massey Energy CEO Don Blankenship's money but rather due to the mistakes of his opponent, Warren McGraw.

Far be it from El Cabrero to deny that his opponent made a mistake or two, but I find the whole Loch Ness thing MUCH easier to believe.

GOAT ROPE ADVISORY LEVEL: UNDER THE WATER