Conservative Fantasy Role Playing

I wonder sometimes how a modern conservative maintains. Romney has won the New Hampshire primary.  All the buzz now is how he’s going to have a much tougher fight in South Carolina, primarily because of the religious and social conservatives who will see him as “not conservative enough.”  There is a consortium of social conservatives meeting this week in Texas to discuss ways to stop him, to elevate someone more to their liking to the nomination.  And right there I have to wonder at what it means anymore to be a conservative. I grew up, probably as many people my age did, thinking of conservatism as essentially penurious and a bit militaristic.  Stodgy, stuffy, proper.  But mainly pennypinching.  A tendency to not do something rather than go forward with something that might not be a sure thing. I suppose some of the social aspect was there, too, but in politics that didn’t seem important.  I came of age with an idea of fiscal conservatism as the primary trait. That doesn’t square with the recent past.  The current GOP—say since Ronny Reagan came to power—has been anything but fiscally conservative, although what they have spent money on has lent them an aura of responsible, hardnosed governance.   Mainly the military, but also subsidies for businesses.  But something has distorted them since 1981 and has turned them into bigger government spenders than the Democrats ever were.  (This is not open to dispute, at least not when broken down by administrations.  Republican presidents have overseen massive increases in the deficit as opposed to Democratic administrations that have as often overseen sizable decreases in the deficit, even to the point of balancing the federal budget.  You may interpret or spin this any way you like, but voting trends seem to support that the choices Republican presidents have made in this regard have been supported by Republican congressmen even after said presidents have left office.) [More . . . ]

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Same and different people

A friend of mine sometimes mentioned a thought that he considered disturbing: If you could rise up high enough into the air, human beings would all started looking the same, like a bunch of ants. One consequence of this perspective is that particular humans would seem expendable and replaceable. Personally, I vacillated between thinking that human animals are exquisitely different from each other or disturbingly the same. Along came Donald Brown to convince me that we are deluded to think that people are meaningfully different from each other. Last night my wife and I watched an unusual video that, to me, reinforced this idea that humans everywhere are largely the same. The video is title "Life in a Day," and it was produced by National Geographic. Imagine 4,500 hours of video all all shot on the same day, edited down to 94 minutes. Here is a description of the project at the site where you can view the entire video:

Director Kevin Macdonald (The Last King of Scotland) and producer Ridley Scott (Alien, Gladiator) team up to offer this candid snapshot of a single day on planet Earth. Compiled from over 80,000 YouTube submissions by contributors in 192 countries, Life in a Day presents a microcosmic view of our daily experiences as a global society. From the mundane to the profound, everything has its place as we spend 90 minutes gaining greater insight into the lives of people who may be more like us than we ever suspected, despite the fact that we're separated by incredible distances.
This is a compelling video that I recommend. It reminded me that most of what I think of as "happening" are the images and sounds I personally experience. For the most part, I don't know what in the world is going on. While I live my life, and it seem important to me, 7 billion other people are living lives that they consider equally important. The video is a terrific reminder that we are each only a tiny part of a much bigger whole.

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E. O. Wilson’s Theory of Everything

The November 2011 edition of The Atlantic presents E. O. Wilson's "Theory of Everything." Wilson's theory takes into account the "eusocial" status of human animals, something that we share with ants and bees, but very few other species. Eusocial animals build complex societies wherein "individuals specialize in various activities and sometimes act altruistically." Wilson has taken the position that eusociality is not the result of close genetic similarity (the explanation offered by "kin selection"). Rather, he is a strong advocate of "group selection." By the way, E. O. Wilson is no relation to another Wilson who has strongly advocated group selection, David Sloan Wilson (and see here). Here's how E. O. Wilson presents group selection, according to a passage from The Atlantic:

In his new book, Wilson posits that two rival forces drive human behavior: group selection and what he calls “individual selection”—competition at the level of the individual to pass along one’s genes—with both operating simultaneously. “Group selection,” he said, “brings about virtue, and—this is an oversimplification, but—individual selection, which is competing with it, creates sin. That, in a nutshell, is an explanation of the human condition. “Our quarrelsomeness, our intense concentration on groups and on rivalries, down to the last junior-soccer-league game, the whole thing falls into place, in my opinion. Theories of kin selection didn’t do the job at all, but now I think we are close to making sense out of what human beings do and why they can’t settle down.” By settling down, Wilson said, he meant establishing a lasting peace with each other and learning to live in a sustainable balance with the environment. If Wilson’s new paradigm holds up—“and it will,” he insisted in an e-mail exchange several weeks after visiting Gorongosa—its impact on the social sciences could be as great as its importance for biology, advancing human self-understanding in ways typically associated with the great philosophers he criticized. “Within groups, the selfish are more likely to succeed,” Wilson told me in a telephone conversation. “But in competition between groups, groups of altruists are more likely to succeed. In addition, it is clear that groups of humans proselytize other groups and accept them as allies, and that that tendency is much favored by group selection.” Taking in newcomers and forming alliances had become a fundamental human trait, he added, because “it is a good way to win.”
This article is a wide ranging work that offers much insight into Wilson's history and accomplishments, and more. For instance, Wilson, an early outspoken advocate of sociobiology, takes some shots at Stephen J. Gould, who he calls a "charlatan." Several decades ago, it was the now-deceased Gould who led the attack against Wilson regarding sociobiology. This is an excellent read, and I highly recommend it.

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The extent to which the thought of terrorism freaks us out

How much is our conception of risk warped by the thought of "terrorism?" Consider that there was a study conducted prior to 9/11 in which people were willing to pay more for insurance to protect them from terrorism than from any cause of death:

A further example highlights how making the description of an event very specific can induce people to see it as much more risky. In an investigation of the effects of wording on people's intentions to buy insurance for air travel, researchers found that that people were willing to pay more for a policy that would insure them against "terrorist acts" as opposed to death from "all possible causes." And yet, as must be obvious to the reader, death from terrorist acts is only one of many ways that could lead to death on an airplane. However, because this scenario was made explicit, it became more salient to people thereby increasing their perception of the risk as measured by their willingness to pay an insurance premium.
[Citing to Johnson, E. J., Hershey, J., Meszaros, J., & Kunreuther, H. (1993). Framing, probability distortions, and insurance decisions. Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, 7, 35-51.] This study was briefly discussed by Daniel Kahneman while discussing his new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow: In his book, Kahneman suggests that things that are vivid in our minds often have far too much influence over us, compared to equal or greater dangers that are not as vivid. For example, you are far more likely to die of colon cancer as a result of not getting a colonoscopy than to die from an act of terrorism. Yet our national budget priorities are massively skewed to try to achieve zero-tolerance regarding terrorism, which is an impossibility despite the rhetoric of virtually every politician who opens his or her mouth on the topic. It seems that we need to work much harder to make non-vivid dangerous activities more vivid, so that we can rationally prioritize. And certainly, we need to resist the urge to decide budget priorities regarding vivid activities in isolation from all other budgetary needs. I write this assuming, perhaps naively, that the bottom line, the thing for which we are ultimately striving, is the general welfare, including the prevention of needless deaths. To the extent that this is true, when setting public policy we need to work much harder to recognize that a death is a death, regardless of the cause.

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