What shoes would you wear?
Two basics
The themes that I really need to dig into are property and religion. Time to put down the basics.
The view of property that underlies my "little scheme" is that, in the absence of the agreement and cooperation of those around you, what's yours is what you can defend. This gets to the heart of my view of the origin of property "rights". There have been plenty of theories of property rights over the ages, from the "divine right" of kings to John Locke's "sweat of the brow" to Rouseau's "there ain't no such thing". I maintain that any realistic view of it shows that the only thing that prevents us from kicking Bill Gates' ass and taking his stuff is society's enforcement of laws that stem from the consent of the people. From L.A. to Baghdad, when the restraint of society breaks down then you get looting. The outcome of this view is to raise the question of what should we all ask in return for going along with this concept of property rights.
Religion also has a basic principle that I think wraps up the argument. The best illustration can be found when the creationists object that "the materialist view starts with ruling out divine influence". They object to this axiom. I ask "what if you allow divine influence?" Would it be possible, for instance, for God to make gravity turn to pull sidways or upwards? If so then how can you build anything? If the basic laws of nature that all of our engineering and construction are based on could be changed at any moment then nothing and nobody is safe. The materialist view is the only thing that allows us to have any certainty at all. Now, if the theist side will allow that God can't change physical laws, then we can talk. But that would tend to interfere with the concept of creation of the universe out of nothing by divine power. Either way, the supernatural view gets you screwed. The materialist view, by contrast, lets you whittle away at nature's mysteries with some confidence that your discoveries will have value tomorrow. Moreover, it fits one hell of a lot better with our day-to-day experience that the laws of nature are consistent. So the resulting principle is that there is no place for God in trying to understand our world.
These two principles form much of the basis of all that I believe, so I'm itching to put them up against anybody who thinks they have a better idea.
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Not much time, so I'll have to keep it simple and just settle the abortion question.
Long ago I got persuaded by a friend that abortion is the taking of a human life. OK. Does that mean we can't do it? Well, no. If we adopt my "little scheme" of a worldview, then it's our society's rules that prevent us from killing other people. That's what societies are for, to mediate conflict and allow us to live and work together without killing each other. But the rules don't say that we can't kill people. Sometimes we can. In self defense we can kill. Accidents, even predictable ones in the case of many hazardous industries, provide opportunities for us to kill people. Most importantly, we get to kill lots of people in other countries that we don't like. There we can kill both people we actually want to kill and also innocents who get in the way. We get to kill thousands of people like this, and nobody has to do time. Our society has complete authority to decide who we can kill and who we can't.
In this view, the question of abortion boils down to deciding at what point a fetus has standing in society to be someone we can't kill. Certainly when a pregnancy is advanced and clearly showing then society must recognize the child. Working backward you arrive at a point where the pregnancy is too early to be detected without chemical tests. Society can't really claim to have taken the fetus into the fold at that point. At the extreme you have the "morning after" pill RU-486 that potentially stops a pregnancy before the woman even knows for certain that she's pregnant.
I assert that societal recognition is the key issue. Before the pregnancy is public knowledge society has no interest in the fetus. At some point in the pregnancy the fetus becomes recognized as a developing new member of the society. There's a big grey area there that has to have a line drawn in it, but it's a managable problem. (Whatever the chosen point is, by the way, it has to apply even if the woman goes and hides to conceal the pregnancy. The logic here is that hiding would remove her from society and she'd be fair game for killing too.) So you hammer out a schedule, as was done in Roe v. Wade, that determines when society embraces the fetus as a member. Before that point the kid is no better than an Iraqi or Cuban child that we're free to send to an early grave with our economic sanctions.
Simple, no? And it fits nicely into my "little scheme". It's like the unified field theory, but without the math.
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The status of the US - China currency exchange rate negotiations - in a
picture.
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Mobility changed everything. This thought struck me yesterday. Our government and legal structures come from an age in which land was the source of all sustenance and wealth. People generally didn't stray too far from where they were born and the land stayed put. Once a local government was in place, it could provide an effective force to mediate disputes and arrive at an at least marginally agreeable solution. Since everyone depended on the land, they generally had to stay and work things out.
With the industrial revolution all that changed. The productive capital changed from land to factories. The factories, unlike the land, could be moved. The factories pulled people from the countryside to the cities, fragmenting the social structure and ties that provided the "safety net". The power of the local and regional governments were weakened dramatically, since the factories could go elsewhere. In the US, the national government stepped in with things like anti-trust to counter the power of industry.
Nowadays, capital flows freely across the globe. National governments can still challenge corporate power, but less than before. One of the hammers that government uses to beat industry with is import restrictions and tarrifs. This one is now limited by trade agreements and the WTO.
Bush may well be thrown out of office over the issue of jobs. Even in this happy event, his successors will have to find some solution to the problem that labor is now an international commodity that industry can take or leave. Labor markets are now subject to price arbitrage between different nations and regions. Unless labor, even skilled labor, becomes a much scarcer commodity than it is today, the trump card of mobility in the hand of the corporations leaves governments with a bad deal.
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My "little scheme"
A bit more by way of introduction. All this will be premised on a worldview I have, my "little scheme". The basics of it are:
1) Humans evolved as social animals adapted to live in groups
2) Society, culture, manners, law, government, etc. are just complex adaptations to make group life work
3) As the environment changes the adaptations must change with it
4) People don't respond well to change
oh, and one other thing
5) There is no God
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The name of this blog comes from a favorite story I tell. It's meant to represent the spirit of the endeavor.
The story is this. Some 10+ years ago, (and again quite recently) a fashion briefly flared in New York of men wearing skirts. The news picked up the story and did some "man on the street" polling about it. They showed one guy getting asked "What do you think of this new fad of men wearing skirts?". He replied "I don't like it." "What's the problem" they asked, and he replied "Well, what shoes would you wear?".
I admire the way that he put aside all of the banal objections born of habit and obstinate resistance to change and just looked at the practical issues. I hope to do likewise.
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