amerikanbeat

Birth citizenship depresses immigrant wages!

April 15, 2009 · 1 Comment

Most anti-immigration arguments beg the question; rather than showing how immigration is a problem, their arguments assume this very conclusion from the start.

By analogy, I heard Rush Limbaugh on the radio arguing against “smart cars”—tiny, very fuel efficient vehicles. His point was that these fare poorly in wrecks with larger cars. The argument was supposed to show that smart cars are a problem; but all it really showed was that the discrepancy between smart cars and larger ones is a problem. Pointing to a discrepancy tell us nothing about how to resolve it; that is a separate issue entirely and must be argued for independently. Rush’s argument points as much to getting rid of large cars as getting rid of small ones. It is just as reasonable for smart car owners to cite the discrepancy in favor of making all cars smart.

The same logic is behind arguments to the tune of “immigrants depress our wages.” Yes, when you have “rational” wage discrepancies among groups—when the wages correspond to discrepancies in skill levels, for instance—there can be a drag on the wages of the more highly paid group. But again, pointing out the discrepancy doesn’t tell us in which direction to resolve it. For the discrepancy describes a mutually adverse relationship. Mexican immigrants could just as fairly argue that the ‘skilling’ of the higher paid workers has served to ghettoize them in the second, low-paid group. Indeed, this skilling accounts for the existence of a tiered wage system in the first place. There is nothing ‘in’ the discrepancy to tell us which is the right way out of it. To side against the immigrants because they are immigrants assumes the very thing the “depression” argument was supposed to prove.

No group of wage laborers in history has ever impugned, legislated or barricaded its way out of a bidding war. There is no reason to think American-born workers will be the first. Their best bet is to unite with Mexican, etc. immigrants and bid together against the wage-payers. That might raise the standard of immigrant living, but if we can stomach that…

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Followup on Darwinism and eugenics, Nazism

April 12, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Here I tried to show that Darwinism does not theoretically license any attempt to engineer humans to become more “fit,” e.g. eugenics, killing disabled people in the Holocaust, etc. I quoted where Darwin himself says the practice would violate morality.

I might have added: Darwin condemns it on practical grounds as well. In The Origin of Species, he writes:

“It is good thus to try in our imagination to give any form [i.e., adaptive feature] some advantage over another. Probably in no single instance should we know what to do, so as to succeed. It will convince us of our ignorance on the mutual relations of all organic beings; a conviction which is necessary, as it seems to be difficult to acquire.”

In other words, not only may we not “enhance” humanity through artificial (versus natural) selection, but it wouldn’t work if it we tried. We simply don’t know which adaptations will enhance fitness and which won’t. The situation is a bit game-theoretic: The complexity of an environment, which includes all of the other organisms, and all of the infinite ways it (and they) might change in the future, preclude a solid basis for “engineering.” This is precisely why the theory of evolution is not a predictive one. It locates a real causal mechanism for speciation, but it by no means follows that we can anticipate precisely how a species will change to come. Yet this is precisely what would be needed in order to “breed” humans for fitness. (We can sort of breed animals for fitness only to the extent they remain in a relatively artificially closed system of domesticity or captivity.)

Ben Stein, et.al.: Do we need any further evidence to prove that Darwinism does not contain the “seeds of horror”?

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Why god cannot be the ground of morals

April 10, 2009 · Leave a Comment

[I admit there is nothing new below. Kai Neilsen made the same basic moves before me. But I think the synopsis is helpful. Also, I refer to god as ‘he’ because I’m a dumbass and a flake and can’t think of an elegant, non-sexist rendering.]

tencommandmentsNope.

A common objection to atheism is that, by removing god, one removes the “grounds” for morality. Without a divine legislator, humans are free to do and think whatever they want. Below, I attempt to show not only that (a) god is not needed to ground morals, but (b) he cannot be a ground for them.

God and morals: The wrong kind of atheist response

Atheists have been quick to respond that they are, in fact, no less moral than anyone else. And while I am loathe to equate “imprisoned” with “immoral,” I expect many theists do, so it may be relevant that the prison population boasts about the same percentage of declared atheists as the broader population.

Chris Hitchens gives an interesting twist on this defense. In The Portable Atheist, he issues a challenge to believers: “Name me an ethical statement made or an action performed by a believer that could not have been made or performed by a non-believer.”

Hitchens’ point is that there is no logical reason why atheists could not behave just as theists. Assuming this is true, however, it probably doesn’t answer the theist’s main concerns: Supposing there is a divine legislator whose will provides the reason (and the only reason) for ethical behavior. Sure, atheists could make any statements and perform any actions they want all day long—just as theists could say and do unethical things, in spite of god’s commands. The point is that they could only do so inconsistently.[1]

The believer argues that, without a belief in god, there is no rational grounds for behaving morally; an atheist can do it, but he cannot justify it.[2]

Fleshing out the theist challenge

The heart of the theist’s worry is over arbitrariness in morals. Unless morals are imported from outside humanity, each human is left free to define the good for himself, or to dispose of moral categories altogether. To be able to say that some choices are wrong requires a collective “touchstone” or measure against which the choices can be evaluated. We can still argue about what is good or bad; but as C.S. Lewis pointed out, that we can argue at all presupposes there is some real standard, independent of the arguers, to be argued over.

But how does god solve this problem? For he is in precisely the same existential position as we, it seems. He has no “touchstone” outside himself. His choices are just as arbitrary. We would do no worse to elect one of our species to legislate—my uncle Ron, perhaps; his communications would be more direct, no doubt, and would avoid messy controversies about the legislator’s existence. If there are problems with “Lord Ron,” invoking god does not so much solve them as push them back one level.

Believers would respond—they would have to—that god is more than a useful place-holder, an expedient “tie-breaker” in moral disputes. He does not so much ‘pick’ the good as he (including his will) just is good. Only if we assume god is perfectly good—good completely and at all times—can we know that whatever actions he wills for us are good.

Two options for theists

Option 1: Morals by divine command

Still, how god’s will relates to the good is unclear. To paraphrase Plato’s Euthyphro dialogue: Is it good because god wills is, or does he will it because it is good?

On the one hand, we could simply define “good” as “whatever god wills.” Then we know for certain that god’s commands are good because “good” simply means “whatever god commands.” But this just thrusts us back upon the King Ron problem. It doesn’t solve the problem of arbitrariness in morals. God might have willed us to eat babies (he could change his mind and will this tomorrow) and it could not but be “good” to do so.

Some theists bite the bullet and accept this unattractive consequence—at least when asked. But it is unlikely they could ever embrace it in practice. Defining “good” as “what god wills” makes nonsense of much of what believers want to say about morality.

They can never, for example, speak of god’s having good (or any other) reasons for what he wills. It cannot be that in his wisdom god chooses this because it is good. This would imply he is referencing some standard of the good outside himself, which determines his choices—when we have already defined him as the sole standard.

Not to mention most theists (traditional Christians, for one) would be put off by the implication that an ‘almighty’ god should be “determined” or “limited” by some force outside himself in this way.

Likewise, every believer is taught that she always ought to do what god wills. (Certainly, the Bible demands this.) But this too becomes impossible. It invokes the same “outside standard” our definitions have forsworn. When “what we ought to do” and “what god wills” have the same meaning, the most one can say is “I ought to do what I ought to do,” or “god wills what god wills.” This bleeds our moral imperatives of substance, rendering them vacuously tautological.

Option 2: God as “substantially” but not logically good

Still, believers need to say that god’s commands are always good if they are to retain the idea that god is the ground of morals. They just need some non-tautological way of doing so. In short: We need to say that what god wills is always, necessarily good, but it is not good by definition. For lack of a better analogy, think of a dog which is not logically brown—dogs can be all kinds of colors, and this dog could have been another—but is still, in fact, always brown.

But this brings up a new epistemological quandary: How could we know god is perfectly good? There was no problem knowing he was good when we were simply defining him that way; we knew this in the same way we know unmarried males are always bachelors, or dogs (of whatever color) are always canines.

One could claim to know god is good because of direct acquaintance with him or his works. His goodness is known in the in the same way we know our a friend’s penchant for jokes or cooking style.[3]

But to know whether god is good requires a prior and independent understanding of the concept of goodness. We have to know what “good” means before we can look and see if god and his works exhibit this quality. His goodness is not just a cognition but a re-cognition.

This explodes the theist’s argument: If we can know what is good before knowing god, this knowledge cannot depend upon him. We cannot “get our morals from god” because we need the morals to know whether he is in any position to give them out.

Conclusion

While the “grounding” of morals is an interesting problem, it is a problem for both theists and atheists alike. Postulating divinity doesn’t get us closer to solving it. Even if there were a god, we would have to get a sense of right and wrong from a source outside him. Thus, the fact that we do possess a sense of right and wrong cannot be an argument for the existence of god.

Notes

[1] Hitchens’ approach exemplifies the problems I have with most of today’s “leading lights” (“brights”?) of atheism. They speak as though the only bad consequences theism could produce are observable: Religion fuels violence, divides people, slows progress on stem cell research, etc. This prejudice leads him to cast the ethical aspect of the debate as one of how we get people to do right stuff.

[2] The theists have a point: Living an authentically moral life requires more than the right behaviors. It requires having the right reasons behind them. Having good reasons is what makes moral actions moral in the first place: If I trip and accidentally cushion a baby’s fall from a balcony, I am hardly to be praised for his rescue. Indeed, I could have been on my way to throw a different baby off a different balcony; maybe I only tripped because I was wearing socks to better sneak into the apartment. Even if I meant to save the baby, but only in a crass bid for media exposure, it ceases to be a moral act. If, however, I place myself in the baby’s way deliberately, I’m a hero, and deserve all the praise I get. The behavior is the same; only the reasons distinguish them.

[3] There are other problems with knowing god’s goodness that exceed the scope of this piece. Note, god is not just good but perfectly good. It is unclear how one could be “acquainted” with any “perfect” quality. Maybe we can know god has been good up to now, but “perfect goodness” projects this quality of goodness into an infinite future—while our data is ever limited to the past and present. But this for another post.

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All wrong: A review of Ben Stein’s Expelled: Part II

April 5, 2009 · 2 Comments

Is the Academy enforcing thought control against Intelligent Design?

Part I of my review covered Expelled’s specious attempt to link Darwinism to nasty “social engineering” projects like eugenics and the Holocaust. Here, I discuss the film’s second major theme: Alleged “thought persecution” of pro-Intelligent Design professors by the academic establishment.

ben-stein-fake-ass-rebelBen Stein: Fake-ass rebel

Negative “freedom”: A bogus virtue

A valorization of ‘negative freedom’—defined as the absence of external constraint—frames the whole film. Stein begins his narrative, “Freedom is what makes this country great….But imagine if these freedoms were taken away.” Well, he doesn’t have to imagine: American professors, he argues, are being punished for sympathizing with Intelligent Design (ID) theory.

The “taken away” line, consequently, is accompanied by a montage of young black Civil Rights marchers brutalized by police dogs and hoses. Stein must intend that the “freedom” fought for by these marchers is the same object now being denied his academics.

This seems a stretch precisely because it is. In truth, there is no generic “freedom” to guide us in morals or social policy. There are only specific freedoms to do specific things. And just as our commitment to “food” doesn’t commit us to favoring every nutritive substance on earth with equal vigor, it is possible to embrace “freedom” without being equally committed to, or worried over, every freedom to do every thing. (Indeed, as every freedom is mutually incompatible with some others, we can’t be equally committed to all.)

If by “we should secure freedom,” Stein really means, “we should secure freedom to teach Creationism in the classroom,” fair enough—and make the case on the merits of the thing. But let us not pretend that a commitment to “freedom” automatically spells a commitment to this freedom.

Academic freedom, no less

Stein is shocked that “scientists” should be less than “free to ask any question, to pursue any line of inquiry without fear of reprisal.” But a strict absence of constraint in the classroom has never existed, much less “made America great.” Nor should it exist. (Nor is Stein really, in his heart of hearts, agitating for any such thing.) It would amount to nothing less than the abandonment of curricular standards.[1]

“Persecuted” professors?

Stein’s general approach

Regardless, Stein’s examples of ID sympathizers persecuted by the academy are so exceedingly weak that we can assume, if this is the best he has, the issue is effectively nonexistent.

Stein’s entire case rests on the testimony of five science professionals profiled in the first fifteen minutes of the film. I dare anyone to watch to that point, parse the narration carefully, and tell me precisely where Stein demonstrates how, in his words, “ID is being repressed in a systematic and ruthless fashion” by the academic establishment.

To establish the victim-hood of his subjects, Stein employs the following suspect tactics:

(1) “Suggesting” causal connections without evidence: Stein describes how a subject (A) made public a commitment to ID, and then (B) suffered some loss of position. “A happened; later, B happened.” Of course, this gives the impression that the two events are actually connected in some way; but if you watch carefully, you’ll see Stein never makes the case. He doesn’t even try.

(2) Overlooking possible causes other than ID loyalties: Often Stein’s “victims” violated some university or professional policies which could just as likely explain their “discriminatory” treatment.

(3) Confusing “fired” with “expired”: In three cases, the so-called “expulsion” of Stein’s subjects coincide with the predetermined end of their contract period.

The charges which don’t fall under these categories are “offenses” which, even if true, are simply not serious. Nor is there evidence they had anything to do with the victims’ ID commitments.

Finally, all of the accounts are purely anecdotal; nothing any “victim” claims is corroborated by other first-hand accounts. (Indeed, where others involved give their versions, they always contradict, and outnumber, Stein’s subjects.)

Stein’s profiled “victims”: A case-by-case analysis

(a) Richard Sternberg

This appears to be Stein’s “flagship” case. According to Expelled, Dr. Richard Sternberg, while managing editor of a biology journal, decided to publish a colleague’s paper “suggest[ing] intelligent design might be able to explain how life began.” At the time, Sternberg also held an “office” at the Smithsonian.

The paper, Stein recounts, “ignited a firestorm of controversy…[Sternberg’s] political and religious beliefs were investigated and he was pressured to resign.” Sternberg adds that the department chair (and other unspecified “people”) said bad things about his decision. But at this point, the worst we have is “pressure…to resign.” And Sternberg didn’t resign from anything. This hardly rates the imposing, red-inked “Expelled!” stamped across Sternberg’s face with a thud—a recurring graphic motif in the film.

So what did happen?

First, Sternberg could not have “resigned” his editorship on account of the article, as it appeared in the issue he’d already scheduled to be his last. In a subsequent issue, the journal’s publisher ran a retraction of the article. This was not for its ID-themed content, but because it violated their own (and standard) peer-review protocol: Sternberg claimed the paper had been reviewed by “four well-qualified biologists,” but refused to name them (and never has); he also failed to mention that he was one of them. The entire process was done behind the backs of the other editorial staff. This is all highly unorthodox and violates the practice and express rules of the journal.[2]

Neither could Sternberg have “resigned” from his job at the Smithsonian, because he didn’t have one. He was an unpaid researcher there under the rubric of another institution. He did, as he claims, “los[e] his office,” but this was not because of the paper, or ID, but because his set term as researcher was up. Right after, he was offered another research position at the same institution. Sternberg’s own email records document his supervisors’ opposition to any sanction of Sternberg for his ID sympathies.

This hardly describes the “exile” the professor claims to have suffered.

(Note too that the journal is a tiny regional paper with a circulation mostly internal to its publishing council. Whatever happened to its editor would hardly implicate “the academy.” )

(b) Caroline Crocker

Caroline Crocker was a biology professor at George Mason University. Stein begins, “After simply mentioning intelligent design in her cell biology class…her promising academic career came to an abrupt end.”

Note the correlation without causality: Crocker mentioned ID here; she lost her job there. But the link between the two events, if any, remains unshown.

Crocker’s “lost…job” amounts to the university’s failure to renew a contract that ended at a set time. This is not at all unusual—especially for part-time faculty, as was Crocker—and implies nothing particularly sinister. The university claims the decision had nothing to do with ID, and there is nothing but Crocker’s “feelings” to say otherwise.

(And Crocker did much more than “simply mention” ID. She taught the damn thing. But more on this below.)

(c) Michael Egnor

Stein narrates: “When neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor wrote an essay…saying doctors didn’t need to study evolution in order to practice medicine, the Darwinists were quick to try and exterminate this new threat.”

So what did this sinister effort look like? In Egnor’s own words, “A lot of people on a lot of blogs called me unprintable names.”

This is the entire charge. At most, some of these bloggers encouraged their readers to call the university and ask for Egnor’s resignation. (We are not told whether any of them ever did.) But Egnor wasn’t fired or driven out from anywhere. His name-callers weren’t associated with any university or professional administration. For this, Egnor is the most dubious recipient of Stein’s thunderous “Expelled!” stamp across the forehead.

(d) Robert J. Marks II

Dr. Marks, an engineering professor at Baylor University, erected a website on the university server to solicit grant moneys for private research. The site explored ID theories. Marks’s entire complaint in Expelled is that the university asked him to add a disclaimer—the same type that introduces every infomercial—clarifying that Marks’ personal views may not represent those of the university. This reflects university policy, which, if anything, appears to have been bent in Marks’ favor to let him keep the site. Instead, Marks chose to export it to another server, where it remains.

Again, this is the entire complaint. Marks is still at Baylor university and continues to receive a river of grant monies totaling in the millions. (And again with the “Expelled!” logo. Jesus. A disclaimer on a website is “Expelled”??)

(e) Guillermo Gonzalez

Finally, Stein profiles astronomer Guillermo Gonzalez of Iowa State University. After publishing the ID-sympathetic book, “The Privileged Planet,” Gonzalez’s petition for tenure was turned down.

Once more, we are presented with two events but no evidence—no attempt, even—to show how they might be connected. Gonzalez himself can only speculate: “I have little doubt that I would have tenure now if I hadn’t done any professional work on intelligent design.” (Well.)

The Chronicle of Higher Education notes Gonzalez, by the time of his tenure denial, “had no major grants during his seven years at ISU, had published no significant research during that time and had only one graduate student finish a dissertation.” A Physics Dept. colleague of Gonzalez reported his work leading up to the denial conspicuously lacked any math, measurements, or tests.[3]

Conclusion

Expelled was Stein’s big chance to slam the intellectual establishment. With two years and a ton of resources (in his words, it is “possibly the most expensive documentary for its length ever made”), he produces this anecdotal piece of shit. It is as if the Klan produced a documentary to prove once and for all the validity of white supremacy and all they present is a couple people saying black guys cut them off in traffic. I’d love to hear from people who find this convincing. I just don’t get it. Ben Stein has always sucked, but he’s better than this.

Two concluding points:

(1) Again, nobody in the documentary was fired, or otherwise sanctioned, for teaching ID. But what would be wrong if they were? As noted, “academic freedom” per se is simply crazy, and even the people who invoke the value don’t believe it in a strict sense. Stein himself gives the caveat that we wouldn’t want teachers to push Holocaust denial or flat-earthism in the classroom. So he must want limits to this “freedom.” But he never specifies what they should look like.

So why couldn’t ID in principle be relevant to one’s claim to lead a classroom or edit a journal? If the theory is plainly, grossly wrongheaded—crudely put, if it’s a damned stupid thing to believe—why should its endorsement not be a sign of scientific incompetence? I mean, fine, argue that it isn’t stupid; but stop acting as though nothing a professor believes could be ever relevant to his tenure.

On the other hand, ID could be a serious liability to scientific performance. It is classic god-of-the-gaps. And if you stop at the next gap, the next unknown phenomenon, and just assume it is designed, you stop looking for a genuine explanation. And the whole history of science—even the science the ID folks accept—is nothing if not the history of naturalistically filling gaps which looked at first to be designed.

(2) The most annoying part of the project is its faux rebellious air. Stein snarkily reports that his subjects “questioned the powers that be” and are now paying the price for it. This is accompanied by montages of the old Soviet Union building walls and showing force against “dissidents.” Of course the academy is supposed to be the brutish, conservative Regime and Stein and the ID guys are the lone rebels. This imagery is part of Stein’s cloying effort to hippen or “MTV”-up the film.

But rebellion in itself is nothing to celebrate. The NAMBLA pederasts’ website is full of challenges to a rigid orthodoxy. Every purveyor of every vile or idiotic thing is almost by definition a convention-flouter. You don’t get to be a cool rebel just because you believe crazy shit.

* * *

Notes

[1] By “scientists,” Stein refers to academics who are also scientists. Granted, the (alleged) persecutions are not strictly for things said, as I wrote, “in the classroom.” Some teachers have been targeted (again, allegedly) for things they wrote in academic journals. But my comments stand: Not only is it unreasonable to expect total freedom in the classroom, it is unreasonable to expect that you can exercise total freedom in your published work and it not affect your claim to a classroom. I’m sure Stein has no objection to teachers’ receiving jobs, or tenure, on the basis of published works. Everyone sees these as factors relevant to one’s teaching status. This is why every published professor with a website lists a C.V. But this relevance works in two directions.

[2] Nor was Sternberg, among those associated with the journal, nearly the most qualified to review the article. The article covered Cambrian-era invertebrates, on which many of the publishing Council are experts. (Sternberg is a taxonomist with no paleontological background.)

The article grew out of a meeting between Sternberg and the author (Stephen C. Meyer)—not the other way around. There is some reason to think they planned it as a “lame duck” parting shot which they knew would never fly under normal circumstances, and which Sternberg would likely be sanctioned if he weren’t already leaving. Meyer offered no new scholarship that would normally occasion publication, but cobbled together parts of papers he’d already published.

[3] The film also mentions “petitions” circulated by an “Avalos,” hinting that it sealed Gonzalez’ fate. Hector Avalos is a professor of Religious Studies at ISU. He co-wrote a general statement (not a “petition” for anything) against ID explanations which was signed by 130 other faculty. It wasn’t a policy document, nor did it result in any policy change. It predated Gonzalez’s tenure bid by two years. Nor did it name Gonzalez or any specific person.

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All wrong: A thematic review of Ben Stein’s “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” part I

March 29, 2009 · 4 Comments

Part I: Darwin and the science of “social engineering”

This documentary film bears two central themes: First, as the title suggests, it charges that American professors are being punished for sympathizing openly with Intelligent Design theory (ID), a spruced up version of Creationism. Second, it wants to place some blame upon Darwinism for inspiring ugly historical movements like eugenics and the Holocaust. This critique is likewise placed within the context of an extended pro-ID argument.

This part of my review deals with the second theme.

ben-stein-airy-suggestibilistBen Stein: Airy suggestibilist

Wrong from the start: Stein’s fatal error

Eugenics is the effort to “fitten up” the human species by breeding the strongest members, while sterilizing or otherwise preventing reproduction by those deemed weaker. The Holocaust, of course, aimed at the same effect by killing off the weaker ones directly. (I refer to these efforts collectively as “social engineering.”)

Stein not at all specific as to why these sins should be laid at Darwin’s door—but more on that later. For now, one obvious problem with any attempt by ID advocates to blame Darwinism for “social engineering” is that the part of Darwinism that (allegedly) licenses these acts is the very part which ID theorists themselves accept.

Proponents of ID, including those interviewed by Stein (e.g. William Dembski), are fond of saying that Darwin’s mistake was misapplication. He started with a sound idea—natural selection—but simply tried to explain too much with it. All ID theorists accept that natural selection explains “microevolution,” or changes within the same species over time. But they deny that it explains the differences between species; that is, they disagree with “macroevolution” whereby one species evolves into a completely different one. It is at this line of speciation that ID folks part ways with Darwin.

Fair enough, let’s assume. But it is not any particular application of natural selection that inspires the “social engineers”—but rather, natural selection plain and simple. If Darwin’s theory, as Expelled contends, contains the “seeds of horror,” then so does the very ID theory the film endorses. I see this inconsistency as nothing less than fatal for the entire project.[1]

What precisely is the claim here?

But let us dig deeper.

Again, Stein never bothers to say just how Darwin is supposed to be connected to Nazism and eugenics. The film throws up a lot of insinuations and “feelings” on the matter, none of which are really explored.

For a few of the documentary’s claims:

* The eugenicists and Nazi architects were “inspired” by natural selection. But so what? Sometimes inspiration is “taken” rather than “given.” Thirty years ago, John Hinckley, Jr. was “inspired by” Jody Foster to shoot President Reagan. Foster was the inspiration, but her influence was completely passive, and completely excusable.

* Many leading Nazis, and almost all eugenicists, “were fanatical Darwinists.” Maybe, but they were mammals and Westerners and a lot of other things, too. Most all of them had noses,  I expect. Correlation is not causality.

* “The Nazis relied on…Darwin.” This is more specific but fares no better. For they also “relied on” bacteriology and neurology. A ton of real science was involved in the torture of and experimentation upon the “unfit.” (Hell, they relied on mundane things like trucks, wool and tinned meats, too.)

Of course, what Stein really means to say is that the Nazis claimed to be relying on Darwin. As such,

* Mein Kampf cites a “correspondence between” Darwinist ideas and Nazi ideas. But even if some ugly movements claimed to be Darwinist, it doesn’t follow that Darwinism is to blame for them. It is not enough that someone claim to be inspired by a belief to perform some horrible act; in order to blame the theory, it must be shown that it has not been misinterpreted. It must be shown that the perpetrators were correct to draw the inference.

* Darwinism is “a necessary condition” for the rise of Nazism (though not a sufficient one). This is more specific yet. But just as correlation is not causality, causality is not culpability. Perfectly benign entities such as oxygen, gravity, the nation-state, British and American citizens, and Jews, are “necessary conditions” for Nazism as we knew it. Of course, that doesn’t make those things bad. Hitler’s grandmother could have been a lovely human being, but she was a “necessary condition” for Hitler(ism).

* * *

So nothing like an argument is to be found above. The film leaves it unclear what the “engineers” thought was Darwinist about what they were doing, and what was in fact Darwinist about it. (This is compounded by the fact that when actual “social engineers” speak for themselves, they aren’t much clearer.) But perhaps we can stitch something together.

Helping Stein along

The breeding of human beings was an attempt to make humans more “fit” by purifying the gene pool of disease, deformity, stupidity, and so forth, on the assumption, of course, that these traits have a genetic basis.

If you look for “Darwiny” elements in this, I suppose you can find them. You could say that selective breeding of any kind is a “mimicking” of the natural selective processes Darwin codified. And granted, Darwin drew an analogy between natural selection and animal husbandry, to help readers understand the former on the basis of something with which they were already familiar. I suppose with some leap of the imagination you could read into this an analogy between human natural selection and human “husbandry.” But to suggest—even openly—an analogy between human evolution and human “breeding” is hardly to suggest that humans be bred. It is just to say the two processes are alike in some respect.

Also, why would the “engineers” think they had to artificially produce mechanisms that are already working naturally? If they were true Darwinists, wouldn’t they predict the unfit would simply die out on their own? A strict Darwinism, it would seem, would obviate the need for “engineering” altogether.

Stein hints at an answer: The film rolls a clip from a Nazi propaganda film in which the narrator argues, “We [Germans] have transgressed the law of natural selection in the last decades” by permitting inferior members of the species (ostensibly Jews, the disabled, etc.) to survive and reproduce.

The suggestion is that in “the wild,” these inferior beings would die sooner and reproduce less, and thus not threaten the gene pool significantly. But modern culture has interfered with these “natural” self-correcting processes. Now we coddle and tolerate inferiors. Modern medicine—corrective surgery, wheelchairs—compensates for what nature has denied them. And liberal politics have removed the competitive pressure for resources by universalizing access to health care, education, suffrage, etc. This means we will cease to evolve (and possibly “devolve”) unless we act the role of nature and remove these genes ourselves.

“Social engineering” doesn’t follow from Darwinism

I guess this is the link Stein wants to draw. But there is nothing authentically Darwinist about this story. Here are the main problems I see with trying to hang “social engineering” on the theory of natural selection:

(1) Darwinism offers a description of a natural mechanism. Even if that description is false, and natural selection doesn’t exist, it is unclear how any description alone could license specific human behavior. The claim that natural selection operates upon organisms in no way implies that we should operate in “the same” way, or engineer things to bring about “the same” effects that it would. Likewise, the theory that cancer causes mortality does not license us to mimic this effect by killing cancer patients.

Darwinist “fitness” is not a moral category; it is not “good” or “right”—it just is. Getting from “disabled animals naturally die out, enhancing fitness” to “we should kill disabled people to enhance our fitness” requires a moral link that is not found within Darwinism itself, but which must be imposed from the outside.

(2) There is no such concept as “fitness” per se. An organism is fit only in relation to a specific environment. Someone that is fit in one environment might not be fit in another. So it makes no sense to say that “unfit” humans are being artificially kept alive in a modern environment; this can only mean that the modern environment—with wheelchairs, welfare, etc.—has now made them fit. Similarly, a person with 20/200 vision might be unfit in a hunter-gatherer tribal environment, but is no longer so in an environment with eyeglass technology. The new environment simply does not select these persons as unfit.[2]

Once more, anyone wishing to rectify our “transgression of natural selection” is not only wrong but reaching beyond the clear bounds of what is authentically Darwinist.

(3) Even if Darwinism did license killing “the unfit” among us, who says that the targets of the Holocaust and eugenics are “naturally” less fit than anyone else? The social engineers had crazy ideas about what constituted fitness. For example, eugenics was driven by unscientific, “Dickensian” ideas correlating poverty with genetic-based human weakness and moral degeneracy. Likewise, the Nazis had poor theories about “blood purity” which deemed the Jews as less fit than others.

These theories are just false. It is simply not the case that poverty stems from “weak genes,” nor that without modern, liberal German amenities, the Jews would die “naturally” before reproducing. Nor do these views have any part in Darwinism; they had to be grafted on from outside.

(4) Assuming the effects of natural selection could be mimicked artificially, this would endorse social engineering only on the insane assumption that everything which can be done ought to be.

Still, putting aside the moral question, it is unclear that “mimicking” natural selection is even possible. Who knows whether our idea of fitness is the same one “nature” would select for, were its modern constraints removed? Even if they match, it is unclear that the goal of fitness can be achieved in a non-counterproductive way.

For instance, as virtually every evolutionary biologist believes (and Darwin seems to), empathy and altruism are themselves evolutionary adaptations. They have a useful social function, on which the reproductive success of the group depends. Mimicking natural selection would require abandoning these behaviors, risking our becoming less fit in the longer term. Trying for group fitness is probably a contradiction in terms.

Conclusion

Any attempt to link Darwin to the horrors of social engineering has to overlook that he explicitly and unambiguously argued against the practice himself. In The Descent of Man, Darwin strenuously condemns this on purely moral grounds. (The quote, with emphasis, and the analysis which follows, comes from this article in Scientific American.)

Darwin writes:

“The aid which we feel impelled to give to the helpless is mainly an incidental result of the instinct of sympathy, which was originally acquired as part of the social instincts, but subsequently rendered, in the manner previously indicated, more tender and more widely diffused. Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature. The surgeon may harden himself whilst performing an operation, for he knows that he is acting for the good of his patient; but if we were intentionally to neglect the weak and helpless, it could only be for a contingent benefit, with an overwhelming present evil.”

As SA points out, Expelled shadily quotes the passage immediately preceding this one in Descent, alleging its support for social engineering. They ignore the one which contradicts that interpretation entirely—though Stein and the producers had to know of its existence.

[See part 2 of this review, and redux.]

Notes

[1] The most Expelled could contend is that both Darwin himself and the “social engineers” misapplied Darwin. Still, this lets Darwin off the hook for anything more than, again, the technical “paper error” of over-explanation. The moral error falls squarely on the heads of the social engineers.

[2] Behind the social engineering theory is an untenable (and un-Darwinian) nature-versus-culture dichotomy. The reason is makes no sense to say we blocked the action of “nature” is because “we” are as much a part of nature ourselves. Indeed, our action changes the environment, and thus the direction of selective pressures on ourselves, but this hardly makes it “unnatural.” All organisms do this very thing. We could change our behavior, and thus the direction of selection, but this wouldn’t be a return to behaving “naturally.” It would just be a different “natural” behavior than the old “natural” one.

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On the “pragmatic” argument for special creation

March 21, 2009 · 3 Comments

[Job training has distracted me from blogging for several weeks. It appears I might be back.]

[I’ve been on an evolution kick. Read Jerry Coyne’s “Why Evolution is True” if you can. It covers all the angles and reads like a novel.]

man_is_but_a_worm_hds_sm1

We’ve all heard the sentiment that our having evolved from “lower” animals is less ennobling than special creation by deity; that it decreases our special worth or dignity.

Sometimes this sentiment is worked up into an argument—as when Darwin’s contemporaries said that one had only to look at the queen to know she just couldn’t have come from a monkey. This is “pragmatic creationism”-proper.

Today, this idea rarely appears as an explicit plank in the creationist’s case, but the feeling persists that evolution degrades humanity, existentially speaking. And I suspect this feeling motivates the creationists: Among this group, there is a broad spectrum of evolutionary phenomena that is admitted: Young-earthers accept no evolution whatsoever; more liberal types accept micro-evolution; others accept macro-evolution nearly across the board; still others (the “irreducible complexity” folks) accept that species macro-evolve, but deny that biochemical cellular processes do. But every creationist stops short of human (macro) evolution.

Two responses leap to mind:

First, it is simply wrong equate the origins of a thing with the thing itself—or the goodness or badness of the one with the goodness or badness of the other. (This is the logician’s “fallacy of origins.”) To say that B came from A is hardly to say that B is A, or is even like A. Granted, Bs often look like their As, and not by accident; sons are somewhat like their fathers, and so forth. But the quality and degree of this identity, and what worth to attach to it, must be investigated, not merely assumed.

Second, “wishin’ don’t make it so.” Assuming we would be made “lower” by lowly origins—why should the facts succumb to our feelings about them? Our origins do not become one way because we would be uncomfortable with alternative scenarios. I may be upset at being the product of an alcoholic father, or an incestuous relationship, but this emotion hardly changes the case.

Darwin weighs in

Darwin himself gave a cleverer answer in the conclusion to his The Descent of Man:

“I am aware that the conclusions arrived at in this work will be denounced by some as highly irreligious; but he who denounces them is bound to shew why it is more irreligious to explain the origin of man as a distinct species by descent from some lower form, through the laws of variation and natural selection, than to explain the birth of the individual through the laws of ordinary reproduction.”

In other words, if it is off-putting that our entire species should have emerged from a “lower” form, it should be at least as off-putting that each individual human develops from a lower form in the womb—a form much lower than any adult “ape” (i.e., pre-human hominid). And yet this development is something no creationist would deny, nor feel particularly bad about.

Worse, on the road to “higher” humanity, the human embryo has to escalate through multiple lower forms: We begin as fish do, with gills, a tail, and a fishlike branchial circulatory system. Then we go through an amphibious, then a reptilian stage. Before becoming recognizably human, we have a brief “lower primate” stage, when the fetus becomes entirely covered with a coat of fine hair called “lanugo.” (We shed this before birth, while monkeys retain it.)

* * *

Our embryonic staging is itself evidence for evolution, in the sense that the story makes better sense on an evolutionary view than on a theory of special creation. Per Haeckel’s famous “ontogeny replicates phylogeny” dictum, the sequence of embryonic stages mimics the sequence of major evolutionary stages through which our species evolved. First we were fish, then amphibians, reptiles, etc. (All other evolved organisms show this pattern also.)

Evolution typically proceeds by addition, or accretion; it is easier (that is, more conducive to fitness and survival) if nature “tacks on” a new feature than to remove one and hope that the remaining ones work around the gap. Of course, this means tacking on a new gene which codes for the feature. In the womb, we develop in ways our “lower” ancestors did (or do) because we have inherited strings of their old genes, the ones that code for their development. We don’t keep the reptilian, etc. features because we have acquired other genes which turn the old ones off before birth.

It is weird enough on technical grounds that a creator would place genes for gills, fur, etc., inside us, only to deactivate them before birth. Instead, s/he could have started us as Aristotelean homunculi: tiny, intact humans that do nothing but grow in size.

On moral grounds, it is pointless that a creator would, in a bid to secure our “specialness,” forbid us as a group to develop from lower beings, only to force each of us individually to develop this way.

Conclusion: The aesthetics of descent versus special creation

The main error of the “pragmatic creationists” is to mistake an aesthetic preference for reality. This aside, is it really preferable on aesthetic grounds that we should have been created, rather than to have evolved?

We are the culmination of a vigorous natural epic, billions of years in the making, one that could have gone in a billion other ways, but didn’t, and that will continue beyond us in ways that we help determine. This is simply more interesting than our having been dropped here, without papers, without biography, without a legacy. For all the reasons “God did it” is a scientific non-starter, it also makes for a piss-poor narrative.

Perhaps our being formed by the same processes as hagfish, dung beetles, and leeches decreases our “specialness” among them. But “being the best” is hardly the only value. And it isn’t always that valuable. It’s lonely at the top. To believe ourselves fundamentally, irreducible set apart from the world can be—it should be—profoundly alienating. An evolutionary story recovers for humans a sense of “at-home-ness” in the world. It permits us to belong and identify.

Not to say that our special place totally dissolves. For we among all “beasts” can reflect upon our mutual heritage. We alone can write the story down. (We alone can blog about it.)

Finally, in poetic terms, our evolution represents a kind of achievement. “We” have struggled, and triumphed. Typically, we praise and admire achievements over charity. (For this reason, heirs and contest winners are always resented by those who “earned” it.) To sit atop this long struggle is arguably more “special” than to have been given the damn thing. Again, this could be said of other species, too, but again, only we can appreciate it.

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Michael Neumann on the meager record of nonviolence as a tactic for social movements

January 27, 2009 · 1 Comment

Below I’ve reproduced a chunk of Michael Neumann’s book The Case Against Israel where he discusses the meager record of nonviolence as a tactic for social movements. (FYI: If you read one book on the P-I conflict, make it this one.)

He raises this in the context of defending the Palestinians’ use of violence to resist the Israeli settlements. Still, it’s a good general treatment of nonviolence as a tactic. It is of interest, for example, to the debate between revolutionary socialism versus social-democratic “socialism by ballot.”

In brief, Neumann looks at the “nonviolent trinity” of Gandhi, MLK, and the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa, arguing that, contrary to popular perception, non-violence (or at least non-violence alone) didn’t win the day. Ergo, the historical record doesn’t support the tactic.

[From pp. 130-34]

“No one can say with certainty that…a strategy [of nonviolence] would not work, especially if the Palestinians were prepared to die in large numbers to effect it. But do the Palestinians, or anyone else, have rational grounds for supposing it would work? Such expectations would have to be based on past experience, and the past is not accommodating. Non-violence has never “worked” in any politically relevant sense of the word, and there is no reason to suppose it ever will. It has never, largely on its own strength, achieved the political objectives of those who employed it.”

“There are supposedly three major examples of successful nonviolence: Gandhi’s independence movement, the U.S. civil rights movement, and the South African campaign against apartheid. None of them performed as advertised.”

“Gandhi’s nonviolence couldn’t have been successful, because there was nothing he would have called a success. Gandhi’s priorities may have shifted over time: he said that, if he changed his mind from one week to the next, it was because he had learned something in between. But it seems fair to say that he wanted independence from British rule, a united India, and nonviolence itself, an end to civil or ethnic strife on the Indian subcontinent. What he got was India 1947: partition, and one of the most horrifying outbursts of bloodshed and cruelty in the whole bloody, cruel history of the postwar world. These consequences alone would be sufficient to count his project as a tragic failure.”

“What of independence itself? Historians might argue about its causes, but I doubt any of them would attribute it primarily to Gandhi’s campaign. The British began contemplating—admittedly with varying degrees of sincerity—some measure of autonomy for India before Gandhi did anything, as early as 1917. A.J.P. Taylor says that after World War I, the British were beginning to find India a liability, because India was once again producing its own cotton and buying cheap textiles from Japan. Later, India’s strategic importance, while valued by many, became questioned by some who saw the oil of the Middle East and the Suez Canal as far more important. By the end of the Second World War, Britain’s will to hold onto its empire had pretty well crumbled, for reasons having little or nothing to do with nonviolence.”

“But this is the least important of the reasons why Gandhi cannot be said to have won independence for India. It was not his saintliness or the disruption he caused that impressed the British. What impressed them was that the country seemed (and was) about to erupt. The colonial authorities could see no way to stop it. A big factor was the terrorism—and this need not be a term of condemnation—quite regularly employed against the British. It was not enough to do much harm, but more than enough to warn them that India was becoming more trouble than it was worth. All things considered, the well-founded fear of violence had far more effect on British resolve that Gandhi ever did. He may have been a brilliant and creative political thinker, but he was not a victor.”

“How about the U.S. civil rights movement? It would be difficult and ungenerous to argue that it was unsuccessful, outrageous to claim that it was anything but a long and dangerous struggle. But when that is conceded, the fact remains that Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement was practically a federal government project. Its roots may have run deep, but its impetus came from the Supreme Court decision of 1954 and from the subsequent attempts to integrate Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The students who braved a hell to accomplish this goal are well remembered. Sometimes forgotten is U.S. government’s almost spectacular determination to see that the federal law was respected. Eisenhower sent, not the FBI, not a bunch of lawyers, but one of the best and proudest units of the United States Army, the 101st Airborne, to keep order in Little Rock and to see that the “federalized” Arkansas national guard stayed on the right side of the dispute. Though there was never any hint of an impending battle between federal and state military forces, the message couldn’t have been any clearer: we, the federal government, are prepared to do whatever it takes to enforce our will.”

“This message is an undercurrent throughout the civil rights struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. Though Martin Luther King still had to overcome vicious, sometimes deadly resistance, he himself remarked that surprisingly few people were killed or seriously injured in the struggle. The surprise diminishes with the recollection that there was real federal muscle behind the nonviolent campaign. For a variety of motives, both virtuous and cynical, the U.S. government wanted the South to be integrated and to recognize black civil rights. Nonviolence achieved its ends largely because the violence of its opponents was severely constrained. In 1962, Kennedy federalized the National Guard and sent in combat troops to quell segregationist rioting in Oxford, Mississippi. Johnson did the same thing in 1965, after anti-civil rights violence in Alabama. While any political movement has allies and benefits from favorable circumstances, having the might of the U.S. government behind you goes far beyond the ordinary advantages accompanying political activity. The nonviolence of the U.S. civil rights movement sets an example only for those who have the overwhelming armed force of a government on their side.”

“As for South Africa, it is a minor miracle of wishful thinking that anyone could suppose nonviolence played a major role in the collapse of apartheid.”

“In the first place, the African National Congress was never a nonviolent movement but a movement that decided, on occasion and for practical reasons, to use nonviolent tactics. (The same could be said of the other anti-apartheid organizations.) Much like Sinn Fein and the IRA, it maintained from the 1960s an arms-length relationship with MK (Umkhonto we Sizwe), a military/guerilla organization. So there was never even a commitment to Gandhian nonviolence within the South African movements.”

“Secondly, violence was used extensively throughout the course of the anti-apartheid struggle. It can be argued that the violence was essentially defensive, but that’s not the point: nonviolence as a doctrine rejects the use of violence in self-defense. To say that blacks used violence in self-defense or as resistance to oppression is to say, I think, that they were justified. It is certainly not to say that they were nonviolent.”

“Third, violence played a major role in causing both the boycott of South Africa and the demise of apartheid. Albert Luthuli, then president of the ANC, called for an economic boycott in 1959; the ANC’s nonviolent resistance began in 1952. But the boycott only acquired some teeth starting in 1977, after the Soweto riots in 1976, and again in 1985-1986, after the township riots of 1984-1985. Though the emphasis in accounts of these riots is understandably on police repression, no one contests that black protestors committed many violent acts, including attacks on police stations.”

“Violence was telling in other ways. The armed forces associated with the ANC, though never very effective, worried the South African government after Angola and Mozambique ceased to function as buffer states: sooner or later, it was supposed, the black armies would become a serious problem. (This worry intensified with the strategic defeat of South African forces by Cuban units at Cuito Cuanavale, Angola, in 1988.) In addition, violence was widespread and crucial in eliminating police informers and political enemies, as well as coercing cooperation with collective actions. It included the practice of necklacing, with a tire set around the neck of the target and set on fire.”

“Though much of the violence was conducted by gangs and mobs, it was not for that fact any less important politically: on the contrary, it was precisely the disorganized character of the violence that made it so hard to contain. And history of the period indicates that the South African government fell not under the moral weight of dignified, passive suffering, but because the white rulers (and their friends in the West) felt that the situation was spiraling out of control. Economic problems were caused by the boycotts and the administration of apartheid was a factor, but the boycott and the administration costs were themselves, in large measure, a response to violent rather than nonviolent resistance.”

“In short, it is a myth to suppose that nonviolence brought all the victories it is supposed to have in its ledger. In fact it brought none of them.”

“How does this bear on the Israel-Palestine conflict? In that situation, success is far less likely than in the cases we have examined. Unlike Martin Luther King, the Palestinians are working against a state, not with one. Their opponents are far more ruthless than the British were in the twilight of empire. Unlike the Indians and South Africans, they do not vastly outnumber their oppressors. And neither the Boers nor the English ever had anything like the moral authority Israel enjoys in the hearts and minds of Americans, much less its enormous support network. Nonviolent protest might overcome Israel’s prestige in ten or twenty years, but the Palestinians might well suppose they do not have that long.”

“The Palestinians will continue to choose, sometimes violence, sometimes nonviolence, most often a mixture of the two. They will presumably base their choices, as they have always done, on their assessment of the political realities. It is a sort of insolent naivete to suppose that, in their weakness, they should defy the lessons of history and cut off half their options. The notion that a people (in any sense of the word) can free itself literally by allowing their captors to walk all over them is in historical terms a fantasy.”

“In short, the Palestinians had to use violence of some sort: it might not work, but there was at least some historical precedent for it working. This, of course, does not license all types of violent resistance..”

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Obama fulfills his first campaign promise—invading Pakistan

January 27, 2009 · 1 Comment

On his third day in office, Obama ordered cross-border attacks on Pakistani tribal areas using missile-firing drones. 22 people were killed, including four children. The attacks violate international law and various treaties to which the US is a party (so they’re unconstitutional also). This makes Obama a war criminal.

(It also makes him a poor strategist. Pakistan notes that the attacks have only further endeared the local tribes to al-Quaeda. This is plausible. This kind of effect on local populations by “our” violence is, to my knowledge, predicted or confirmed by every Pentagon study to date on the War on Terror.)

The victims may or may not have had something to do with fighting in Afghanistan. Of course, these “terroristey” types are precisely the sort we lock up in Guantanamo, and the the quality of “evidence” on which the attacks were ordered is precisely the sort we use to put them there. This should prove the token nature of Obama’s effort to shut down Guantanamo: We can kill them but not lock them up? (And really, “shut down” just means relocating the residents to another prison and diverting new suspects to one of the several interrogation camps we aren’t shutting down).

Despite Obama’s inaugural promise to stop executive secrecy, the new White House refused to comment on the attacks.

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On the spurious idea of a nation’s “right to exist”

January 25, 2009 · Leave a Comment

A bit about this whole “right to exist” that preoccupies Israeli political discourse:

Assuming any sense can be given to the concept of a “right” at all—it probably can’t; it certainly hasn’t—the origins of virtually any nation-state are so noxious, and so certain to have violated many hundreds of thousands of “rights” in the process of their establishment—that no state has the “right to exist.”

Of course, Israel and its defenders assume that to deny a “right to exist” is to endorse the dissolution of that the thing being denied. But this doesn’t follow. “Right” or not, the state of Israel does exist—and so do all the other states without the “rights” to do so. The question is not whether these entities have a right to exist, but whether it would be moral to dissolve them. Removing Israel as a national entity would be so reprehensible, cause so much pain and chaos—violate so many “rights,” if you like—that any such program would be immoral. The Israeli state—any state—should be suffered to exist not because it has the “right,” but because bringing about the alternative to its existence would be wrong.

For this reason, demanding that Hamas recognize Israel’s “right to exist” before any negotiations or concessions can proceed is unreasonable—because the concept is unreasonable. But even if it were reasonable—that is, even if Israel actually had a “right to exist”—it wouldn’t mean that a demand that others recognize that fact is reasonable. I mean, if Israel has a right to exist, it has many other things as well—say, lush hillsides. Should we demand that Hamas recognize Israel’s lush hillsides before anything can happen? Again, since a right to live in security, or defend itself, does not depend on any “right to exist,” we should no more care how a political party in a neighboring region feels about Israel’s “right to exist” than we should care how it likes its eggs in the morning.

Noam Chomsky’s analysis seems to me correct: An abstract “right to exist” is unique to the Israel-Palestine conflict; it isn’t talked about anywhere else in political science. It emerged in the 1970’s when the Arab states accepted Israel’s “right to live in peace with secure and recognized boundaries.” This, of course, is something all states are minimally granted—it’s more or less a part of the very definition of statehood.

When certain Israeli political elements sought to obstruct meaningful negotiations with the Palestinians, they elevated the standard from the usual “right to live in peace (etc.)” to this goofy “right to exist.” They knew that Palestinian negotiators would feel a “right to exist” would validate of the origins of Israel—the dispossession of Palestinian lands out of which Israel was carved. They knew this was too much for the Palestinians to swallow, and would buy Israel time to create new “facts on the ground”—namely, the settlements, which make negotiations, and concessions of land by Israel, even harder.

By analogy: Let’s say you have built a house on my land without my consent. I’ve fought you for years about it but now I realize what’s done is done. You have a house and it isn’t going away. I agree to let you “live in peace and security,” which is little more than to recognize you as, indeed, my neighbor. But as soon as I endorse your “right to” live there, I suggest that it was OK for you to have stolen the land in the first place. This is another matter entirely.

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On the nature of Israeli apartheid

January 25, 2009 · 1 Comment

John Spritzer has an older but relevant article on what just makes the Jewish state Jewish. To quote:

“The Jewishness of Israel is embodied in a set of laws which confer rights and benefits on Jews but not on others.” […]

“The second-class status of Arabs inside Israel is enforced by laws that privilege being Jewish, rather than by a formal denial to Arabs of citizenship or the right to vote and hold office. Thus the document says that Arabs shall have ‘complete equality of social and political rights’ and ‘full and equal citizenship and due representation in all its [Israel's] provisional and permanent institutions.’ But the Law of Return, passed in 1950, begins: ‘Every Jew has the right to immigrate to the country.’ Yet one of the central grievances of Palestinians is that they cannot do the same thing; they cannot return to their homes of many generations in Israel. Even Arabs who never left Israel, but who only stayed for a few days in a nearby village with relatives to wait for the fighting in 1948 to end, are now categorized in Israel as ‘present absentees,’ a category in which they remain forever, and in consequence of which their homes and property remain in the possession of the Custodian of Absentee Property, who puts the property at the disposal of Jews.”

“Private organizations serving only Jewish interests hold quasi-governmental authority in Israel for policies that affect non-Jews. The main example of this is the Jewish Agency, which calls itself ‘the agency for Jewish interests in Eretz [‘the land of"] Israel…[it's] role is defined…as a voluntary, philanthropic organization with responsibility for immigration, settlement and development, and coordination of the unity of the Jewish people.” The (Jewish) Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs describes the Jewish Agency as ‘a quasi-public, voluntary institution sharing many, often overlapping, functional jurisdictions with government.’ Yes, Arabs could set up a private ‘Arab Agency,’ but it would not have the quasi-governmental power, for example, to dispose of Jewish property the way the law allows the Jewish Agency to dispose of Arab property: the state’s Custodian of Absentee Property hands Arab property to the Jewish Agency, but it does not hand Jewish property to any Arab agency. Jews don’t have their property confiscated as “present absentees” because Jews, unlike Arabs, enjoy the “Right of Return.’”

“The U.N. Conciliation Commission estimated that about 80 percent of the land in what is today Israel is property formerly owned by Palestinians that was confiscated by Jewish organizations like the Jewish Agency. Palestinians are forbidden by Israeli law from owning it. Of all the land that may be legally sold in Israel, 67% of it may not legally be sold to Arabs, while none of it is barred from being sold to Jews. Thus, while Palestinians may be citizens in Israel, they are second class citizens, which is precisely what it means to live in a ‘Jewish state’ when one is not Jewish. Yet another feature of Israel that makes it an apartheid state is that it aims to separate Jews and Arabs on a personal level. For example, a Jew and an Arab cannot legally marry each other in Israel; such marriages, if performed outside the country, are not recognized under Israeli law.”

“Section 7A(1) of the Basic Law of Israel explicitly prevents Israeli citizens – Arab or Jewish – from using the “democratic” system of Israeli elections to challenge the inferior status of Arabs under the law; it restricts who can run for political office with this language: ‘A candidates’ list shall not participate in elections to the Knesset if among its goals or deeds, either expressly or impliedly, are one of the following: (1) The negation of the existence of the State of Israel as the State of the Jewish People. …’ In a 1989 Israeli Supreme Court ruling (reported in the 1991 Israel Law Review, Vol. 25, p. 219, published by the Faculty of Law at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) Justice S. Levine, speaking for the majority, ruled that this law meant that a political party could not run candidates if it intended to achieve the cancellation of one of the fundamental tenets of the State – namely ‘the existence of a Jewish majority, the granting of preference to Jews in matters of immigration, and the existence of close and reciprocal relations between the State and the Jews of the Diaspora.’”

[Spritzer’s full article here.]

There is more to the issue than Spritzer covers. To quote something I wrote some time ago:

Resource allocation [in Israel] is skewed toward the Jewish ‘sectors’.  Examples of this could fill books (and indeed do).  Human Rights Watch has extensively documented the Jim Crow nature of the state, calling Arab schools and neighborhoods “separate and unequal” as a matter of policy. (See HRW, “Second Class: Discrimination against Palestinian Arab Children in Israel’s Schools” here.) Another report notes the many Arab neighborhoods in Israel which, despite housing thousands, have been declared “unrecognized” by the state and hence remain ineligible for public goods (like electricity and water) altogether. (There are no cases of “unrecognized” Jewish-majority neighborhoods, and there are “recognized” Jewish neighborhoods further out on the periphery of the country than non-recognized Arab ones, indicating the problem is deliberate and not logistical). (See also Lustick, “Arabs in the Jewish State: Israel’s Control of a National Minority.”)

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