My first public outing as a miosgynist happened in the comments section to this Chicago Maroon article, where one commenter astutely observed:

Ms. Pillsbury, thank you for the insightful article. I completely disagree with the comments made by the above, Mr. Vipul Naik, and frankly take offense to them.

The issue is clearly that there are not enough (or, sadly, any)female mentors for women wishing to pursue and academic career in mathematics. I’m not exactly certain what Mr. Naik is getting at by saying that a plausible explanation for gender imbalance is the “fact that the women entering the courses were on average not as mathematically capable as the men entering the courses,” but the quip seems like some what of a Larry Summers-esque low blow. While you may believe that women rising in the field today suffer from crippling “psychological inhibitions learning from others of the opposite gender,” the real conflict they must contend with is incompetent, bumbling male professors like YOU sir who have trouble teaching to the opposite sex.
Previous research focused on class engagement as it relates to gender has shown us that male students are more likely to actively engage in class, regardless of whether or not they understand the material and/or have something substantive to contribute while female students are more likely to be more reserved until they are confident they can contribute positively to the classroom environment. Professors must be aware of these generalized tenancies, and stop calling on the boy that raises his hand a million times while shifting their attention to the girls in the room who may be formulating their ideas in the same manner, yet just not as vocally.

As educators, it is your job to TEACH and ensure that each of your pupils gets the attention they deserve and that is necessary for them to flourish. The larger question must be then, why are we not more alarmed that these male professors have yet to be held accountable for all the careers of mathematically inclined women they have squashed?

Other places where I’ve expressed my misogyny:

• my recent post on misogyny and conspicuous outrage, where I outed myself as a denier of female franchise.
• Women in STEM fields, where I outed myself as an opponent of women in science, technology, and mathematics.
• This comment, where I expressed the view that women are just dumb users and can never be actual creators of stuff.

Peter Thiel, wrote an essay The Education of a Libertarian in Cato Unbound in April 2009 as part of the month’s issue title From Scratch: Libertarian Institutions and Communities. In the essay, he argued that libertarian and free market ideologies had little hope of gaining traction in current nation-states, and the best hope for libertarians was to seek to carve out a new space for themselves, as is being attempted by Patri Friedman and his colleagues with seasteading. A small part of his lengthy essay went as follows:

Indeed, even more pessimistically, the trend has been going the wrong way for a long time. To return to finance, the last economic depression in the United States that did not result in massive government intervention was the collapse of 1920–21. It was sharp but short, and entailed the sort of Schumpeterian “creative destruction” that could lead to a real boom. The decade that followed — the roaring 1920s — was so strong that historians have forgotten the depression that started it. The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of “capitalist democracy” into an oxymoron.

If you’re interested in the extent to which Thiel’s argument about gender differences in voting patterns are correct, check out Brad Taylor’s blog post, a more indirectly relevant blog post by Bryan Caplan, and a decent discussion on Quora. See also a follow-up clarification by Thiel and a post by Jason Kuznicki, one of the editors of Cato Unbound, offering some context.

Here were some of the reactions that this engendered.

Libertarian inadvertently argues for 90% marginal tax rate by Amanda Marcotte (who is apparently famous enough to have her own Wikipedia page):

But focusing on just his hostility towards the vote of women, non-white people, and people who aren’t rich—-while fun—-means that you miss out on the many layers of fail inherent in this column. The piece works as an effective argument for a 90% marginal tax rate. Thiel comes across as a depressive who drowns his misery in alcohol, and what he needs is some good, old-fashioned, sleeve-rolling-up work. There is nothing like having something to do with yourself to keep the blues away, as well as fantasies of punishing them all by robbing most people of the vote and turning the vast majority of the nation into wage slaves and housebound sexbots. If Thiel had useful work, he also wouldn’t have a few drinks and write, as if in all seriousness, about how he is going to take his ball and escape this land of the fleshbound non-libertarians. [...] No need to quote at length—-I think we all know what a combination of watching too many sci-fi movies (plus “Waterworld”) and being completely shielded from reality by your money can do. You become either Kim Jong Il, or you become Peter Thiel. We can’t reach Kim Jong Il, but what we can do to help Thiel is to tax away most of his wealth. While that doesn’t initially seem like it’s helpful to take 90% of what someone makes over X million a year, what it would do is force Thiel to get out there and actually work for his money if he wants to be stinking rich. Right now, he’s obviously not getting out of the house much, and all that sitting around counting his money and not associating with the real world is breaking his mind. He needs something to do, and needs to associate with people. Ideally, he’d be in a situation where he had occasional exposure to people who don’t indulge his crazy fantasies. And with the amount of money shielding him from the world, that’s not going to happen. For his own good, that pile of money he’s sitting on needs a dramatic reduction.

Marcotte’s post received further discussion here.

The right floats off to Neverland. No girls allowed! by Michael Lind on Salon:

Patri’s Seastead Institute has received funding from Paypal founder Peter Thiel, who also funds the Methuselah Foundation, which seeks to end aging and make everyone immortal. In a companion essay on April 13 on Cato Unbound, Thiel endorses Friedman’s rejection of democracy: “I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual [!]. For all these reasons, I still call myself ‘libertarian.’” He goes on to say that “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Why is democracy incompatible with freedom? According to Thiel, one problem with democracy is that women have the right to vote: “Since 1920, the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women — two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians — have rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron.” What could more beautifully illustrate the pubescent male nerd mentality of the libertarian than Thiel’s combination of misogyny with the denial of aging and death? We had a nice John Galt libertarian paradise in this country, until girls came along and messed it up!

Thiel continues: “In our time, the great task for libertarians is to find an escape from politics in all its forms — from the totalitarian and fundamentalist catastrophes to the unthinking demos that guides so-called ‘social democracy.’” After considering the possible mass migration (if that is not a contradiction in terms) of libertarians to cyberspace and outer space, he opts for Fantasy Island: “The fate of our world may depend on the effort of a single person who builds or propagates the machinery of freedom that makes the world safe for capitalism. For this reason, all of us must wish Patri Friedman the very best in his extraordinary experiment.”

Here’s an idea. Thiel could use his leverage as a donor to combine the Seasteading Institute with the Methuselah Foundation and create a make-believe island where girls aren’t allowed to vote and where nobody ever has to grow up. Call it Neverland. It would be easy for libertarian refugees from the United States and the occasional neo-Confederate to find it. Second star to the right, and straight on till morning.

Cato Institute Crashed, Burned, and Smoking Watch by Bradford De Long:

The “vast increase in welfare beneficiaries” as a reason to believe that freedom and democracy incompatible I take to be code for “granting the franchise to African-Americans.” And “the extension of the franchise to women… [has] rendered the notion of ‘capitalist democracy’ into an oxymoron” hardly needs explanation.

By the way, here’s what Thiel says in his clarifying post:

I had hoped my essay on the limits of politics would provoke reactions, and I was not disappointed. But the most intense response has been aimed not at cyberspace, seasteading, or libertarian politics, but at a commonplace statistical observation about voting patterns that is often called the gender gap.

It would be absurd to suggest that women’s votes will be taken away or that this would solve the political problems that vex us. While I don’t think any class of people should be disenfranchised, I have little hope that voting will make things better.

Voting is not under siege in America, but many other rights are. In America, people are imprisoned for using even very mild drugs, tortured by our own government, and forced to bail out reckless financial companies.

I believe that politics is way too intense. That’s why I’m a libertarian. Politics gets people angry, destroys relationships, and polarizes peoples’ vision: the world is us versus them; good people versus the other. Politics is about interfering with other people’s lives without their consent. That’s probably why, in the past, libertarians have made little progress in the political sphere. Thus, I advocate focusing energy elsewhere, onto peaceful projects that some consider utopian.

If you want a quick summary but don’t want to buy the book, check out Caplan’s blog post on the parental wish list.

The usual caveats apply. Since they aren’t mentioned in the specific blog post I linked to above, I will list them here briefly:

• Parenting has a huge short-run impact but the impact fades out as children row up and move away from the parents. The heritability of many traits increases with age as people shed off the influences of their parents and discover more their own inner genetic preferences and tendencies.

• The studies that these estimates are based on compare families in developed countries that are considered fit by adoptive agencies to raise kids. The estimates may not generalize over the entire range of possible families. Heritability may be lower across a larger selection of possible parents.

• The study compares parenting techniques currently in use by significant numbers of people. Truly weird or outlandish parenting techniques may produce big influences.

• The studies compare variance, not absolute quantities. The question is to what extent variation in a trait (such as reading skill) can be ascribed to variation in parenting strategies, not whether a child will learn to read if the parents refuse to expose her to books or send her to school. The studies do not compare people across different generations so changes in the overall environment can have an impact (a secular trend of increasing height has been observed by many, and a secular trend of increasing IQ has also been observed).

• The studies don’t support genetic determinism in its most direct form — rather, they indicate a huge proportion of variance not explained by genes or shared environment. This is basically the variation that arises from all the individual choices and experiences that are not determined by parenting strategies. They may include biological history (did the child get a bout of sickness), individual influences and inspirations, free choices, etc. No single influence has been identified within this that has a large share to contribute.

Unlike Caplan, I will not focus here so much on the implications of the nature-nurture debate for parenting. Rather, I will make one obvious key observation: if parenting has such little impact on individuals, most other efforts to change or modify individuals are likely to have completely negligible impacts.

Influences work best on people when they are already keen on those influences and seeking those influences. What matters is the range of options and influences available to people, and the freedom to choose the influences that best suit them. This helps explain why significant differences in people’s achievement, income, happiness, and other measures based on the country and time period that they live in — despite the fact that in the same country and time period, people with similar genetic endowments do similarly. An argument of this sort is provided in this famous paper by Dickens and Flynn which tries to resolve the paradox of high heritability of IQ within a time period combined with a secular trend of increasing IQ across decades.

This has important implications for people who want to do good in the world. There is a common saying of the form: If I can help one person, my efforts have been worth it. Helping even one person is an achievement of note. But given what the literature on fade out suggests, fade out is pretty strong for practically all kinds of help — not just parenting (see here for fade-out of teacher effects on students).

My take-away from this is simple — helping, or changing, individuals, is generally speaking too much work for too little gain. So what’s a better way to help people? The key in my view is leverage:

• Make and do stuff that lots of people — not just specific people you are trying to help — want, or can benefit from.

• Make this stuff readily accessible to lots of people.

• Don’t nag or bully people into using the stuff. Let people choose to use the stuff when it best suits them. When people choose to use stuff of their own accord, it’s likely to be most relevant to their needs. If you force it down their throats, they may gulp or swallow it, but fade out will follow soon.

Thinking in terms of leverage means foregoing the intense experience of helping specific individuals* and instead going for the more hands-off experience of doing stuff that helps people unknown to you, often each person being helped in such a small, insignificant way that they don’t devote much thought to it.

*I don’t mean to suggest that spending time with other people on mutually enjoyable activities is bad — that’s obviously a good thing in general. What I am talking about is spending time trying to “change” another person in ways that are obviously unpleasant or fatiguing for both parties involved, and where the other party doesn’t appear to be an eager participant to the change process.

The first was watching this TEDx talk by Sam Richards on empathy. Richards claims that the key skill needed to become a sociologist is empathy — being able to put oneself in another person’s shoes. That’s the first minute or so of his talk. After that, he sketches an example of building empathy with suicide bombers and insurgents in Iraq, taking short detours to building empathy with US soldiers who are commanded to fight them.

The second was my participation in the comments section of an article in the Chicago Maroon regarding protests against possible layoffs of housekeeping staff (you can also read this Chicago Weekly article or view Keep Housekeepers, a protest website created by students). Some of the logic in the comments reminded me of what Bryan Caplan calls make-work bias (see here and here for more). However, beyond using what I think was fallacious economic reasoning, my critics also made a resonant point about my lack of empathy for the plight of the workers who might lose their jobs.

Both these led me to formulate more clearly what I consider the chief problem with the a little empathy approach that I find all too common.

Empathy requires knowledge, not just willingness

If you listened to the proponents of empathy such as Sam Richards, you might come with the impression that all you need to experience empathy is to be willing to do it, overcoming the internal resistance to doing so. But the willingness to feel empathy is a trivial and largely non-existent obstacle. Psychopaths aside, most people want to feel empathy for others. Good intentions, and the desire to understand and feel empathy for others, are all over the place. What’s lacking is accurate knowledge about other people’s actual thought processes, incentives, beliefs, values, and constraints. A person serious about feeling empathy as more than just a feel-good exercise would concentrate on acquiring that knowledge with an open mind.

To take the example of Sam Richards’ presentation, he makes a case for feeling empathy for insurgents, freedom fighters, and suicide bombers in Iraq. In order to concretely feel empathy, he needs to develop a narrative for the salient thoughts, feelings, experiences, and motivations of these suicide bombers. He builds this narrative with moving images. However, he offers very little by way of evidence that this narrative is in fact the narrative that actually fits the suicide bombers. I am not here to argue that his particular narrative is false, but it is certainly not the only plausible one. Is oil as important a part of the story as Richards makes it out to be? Is relative poverty as important as he makes it out to be, or more, or less? What about the role of religious belief, which Richards mentions very parenthetically — is it more important than he makes it out to be? These are all serious questions on which many people disagree. It is likely that Richards has studied the matter and come to the conclusions he presents after careful study. Yet he offers his viewers little of that evidence, whether polling data, or ethnography, or the actual words and recordings of suicide bombers, or other indirect forms of evidence. By using a storied style, Richards appears to be using emotional leverage to build the case for one particular mix of factors.

Now, a TEDx talk is meant to be short and flashy, so it is obviously not possible to build a conclusive academic case in one direction. However, Richards might have done better to place emphasis on the fact that accurate knowledge and information, collected through a diverse range of sources and methods, is a first step to building empathy for others. Otherwise, the empathy is just empathy with a make-believe character, not with the actual person, and it could be rigged to favor one’s particular original biases.

Sometimes it is necessary to form very crude caricatures or snap judgments, or make general statements about multitudes based on general human psychology rather than a study of the specifics. For instance, the economist focus on incentives, the psychological focus on formative childhood experiences or feelings, the sociological focus on socio-economic and cultural factors, all give first-pass approximations on how people may be behaving and feeling and thinking. Such crude general first passes should be recognized for what they are — crude first passes that create a presumption in favor of certain predictions — and that need to be refined further based on closer analysis. To build a storied narrative of “empathy” based on such crude first passes gives the illusion of intimacy without the concrete knowledge that would justify it.

Seen versus unseen: availability bias

Getting empathy out the door too quickly may limit one’s empathy only to those who are most visibly impacted by something (this is a corollary of the availability heuristic). To take the example of the Chicago Maroon comments debate above, people who took the opposite position from me made arguments such as:

CRAIG JOHNSON:

This is not a textbook. This is not a lecture hall. This is not the 19th century. We are talking about actual people here. Real people who live lives, have children and other loved ones, who make plans, who make mistakes, who get hurt (physically and emotionally), who want to provide for others, who want to live long and fulfilling lives. For some of these people, loosing these jobs might be it. No apartment, no heat, no medicine, no insurance, no college for their kids.

I know that you know that, and I know that there are other actual people who would take these housekeeping positions if they were offered with lower wages or no benefits. But reducing the amount of compensation people receive from housekeeping work (which is notoriously strenuous and physically harmful) just doesn’t seem to me like the best way to improve people’s lives.

And with a 5.5 billion dollar endowment it is simply not true to say that the University can’t or shouldn’t afford its housekeeping staff. As one of the biggest employers on the south side, and after the incredible strain and destruction it has leveled on the surrounding communities, seems to me the University can endure the burden of paying a living wage.

COLIN LOW:

What an ironic sense of entitlement, to have someone who can afford to teach/study at this university (however much one works to pay for that service) call university workers who earn $15-$16/hour “privileged”.[...]

(2) You fail to account for the psychological and emotional distress that arises from job instability. The formula you suggest, in which lower-wage workers constantly replaces higher-wage workers for the same job, would only work if knowledge/channels for seeking of alternative jobs are much smoother than they are in reality.

Over-eagerness to feel empathy with those who are clearly potential victims or sufferers often leads to ignoring the unseen gains to others — or even the ways in which those potential victims have responsibility for their own fate. Make-work bias runs rife because of people’s instinctive empathy for those who may lose their jobs when productivity enhancements render some jobs redundant. Such empathy blinds many to the value created for society by labor-saving innovations, or even to the new jobs that are created as a result of that freed labor. Bastiat’s Candlemaker’s petititon pokes fun at the economic logic. But the deeper problem isn’t the lack of understanding of economics, it is people’s sense of empathy.

As Bryan Caplan notes, part of the empathy difference may be personality differences: in this blog post, Caplan notes that people who are high on “agreeableness” tend to be poor at understanding or accepting the logic of arguments against minimum wage laws or of labor-saving innovation (note: this isn’t counting those who accept the logic but come up with counter-arguments, rather it refers to those who get indignant at such arguments).

Further, he argues that hyperactive empathy (or sympathy) with some chosen others often comes coupled with indifference to the plight of strangers outside of one’s sight. Thus, hyperactive sympathy for low-skilled workers in developed countries can lead “well-meaning” people to support immigration restrictions that prevent millions of potential immigrants from escaping absolute poverty (see also here).

My modest proposal

Given that people have a natural tendency to feel empathy for others, and that this tendency to empathy is a crucial ingredient to understanding and dealing with other people, how best can the dangers of “a little empathy” be avoided? I have some modest suggestions that I try to follow:

• Admit ignorance: When people ask you to feel empathy for others, first admit ignorance of all the things you don’t know about those others that make the task of feeling empathy impossible.

• If it matters, build the knowledge so that you can experience informed empathy: If you want to feel empathy for some other people, either in order to understand them or help them or deal with them, seek knowledge. Ask the right questions, collect data from whatever types of sources work best (direct conversation, observation of actions, large-scale polling data, ethnographic accounts, input from others who have dealt with those people).

• If you’re using a first-pass caricature or stereotype, don’t confuse that with a deep and intimate understanding: First-pass rough-cut models are great to use since it isn’t possible or economical to collect deeper data in many cases. But treat these models as rough-cut models. Don’t confuse them with full-scale empathy. Don’t imagine a deeper, more insightful understanding than the evidence warrants.

• Search for the unseen in the “seen versus unseen” — look for the arguments and evidence regarding the effects on other parties: Don’t get stuck in one person’s shoes, see the bigger picture. Think about the larger moral issues involved, whatever your specific moral perspective.

(Note: I link to Wikipedia entries in the beginning but later in the post provide links to the writings of Christian apologists as well).

Christian apologetics (Wikipedia entry) is basically a branch of Christian theology that seeks to defend the Bible in rational, historical, and philosophical terms. Practitioners of Christian apologetics are termed Christian apologists. “Apologetics” and “apologists” are not merely derogatory terms used by critics but rather a label that Christian apologists happily embrace.

A key weapon in the apologist arsenal is Biblical hermeneutics (Wikipedia entry), a collection of sophisticated tools that, together, allow one to “interpret” any Biblical passage to obtain a meaning in stark contrast with what the passage appears (to the naive, untrained eye) to clearly say.

One principle that some apologists use to defend Deuteronomy and similar embarrassments is the Covenant principle, which basically argues that God chose different ways to “relate” to his “subjects” in different eras, and “signed” different Covenants with his subjects in each era. A covenant that was suitable in the time and place where Deuteronomy was situated is not applicable today. In this telling, there is nothing per se wrong with killing people who worship other Gods, because these people (including those living in different cities) have all “signed” a covenant with God to worship him (of their own free will, perhaps?) so that it is justified to kill them for violation of “contract.”

Let’s consider Christian apologist Aaron Brake making a valiant effort to describe the relation between Old Testament law and what Christians should do today. Brake makes three points, which I quote here (preserving bold and emphasis):

First, it must be remembered that the Mosaic Law is a covenant and this covenant is a binding contract between two specific parties: Yahweh and Israel. Christians under the new covenant are not in view here. This means “we should assume… that none of its stipulations (laws) are binding on us unless they are renewed in the new covenant.”(5)

This leads to the second point: many (though not all) of the civil and ritual laws of the Old Testament are clearly not renewed in the New Testament. These laws served to govern the daily life of ancient Israel both in their relationship with God and their relationship with one another. Even though these laws are God’s self-revelation revealing the character of God, it must be remembered that no Christian today is a citizen of ancient Israel.(6) Furthermore, the ritual laws within Israelite worship and ceremony found their fulfillment in the once-for-all sacrifice of Jesus Christ.

Finally, some laws and aspects of the old covenant are renewed in the new covenant and therefore are binding on Christians. These include the two great commandments found in Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18 as well as the Ten Commandments.

In summary, while the Law may not be regulatory for Christians it continues to be revelatory.

An article on the Tektonics website titled The Law and The Christian considers three different kinds of laws:

• First, some laws are universal moral laws. This includes do not steal, do not kill, and others. There is no disagreement that these laws should indeed be continued to be obeyed today, so we need not discuss them further.
• Second, some laws are cultural universals. By this I mean laws geared to Israel’s culture that have a universal moral law behind them. As an example, some have suggested the prohibition on trimming your beard [Lev. 19:27] relates to pagan practices that cut facial hair for magical purposes. So the universal behind this cultural would be, don’t do the occult. But here is my favorite example, from Deut. 22:8-9: “When you build a new house, make a parapet around your roof so that you may not bring the guilt of bloodshed on your house if someone falls from the roof.” One Skeptic says, “One would be hard-pressed to find home builders” who follow this rule. But actually they do follow the modern equivalent. In ancient Israel, the flat roof of a house would be used for many purposes, such as sleeping, household chores, and entertaining. These chores included drying and storage of produce; even today the roof is used for such things in modern Arab nations. We don’t use our roof the same way — the modern equivalent is a balcony. Our builders certainly do make sure that they follow the point of this rule to the letter. At any rate, it would also be agreed that the universals behind these cultural applications should continue to be followed.
• Finally, there are ceremonial laws. Instructions for building the Ark of the Covenant, for example, are definitely in this, as are sacrificial laws. What else belongs in here? Most likely the dietary laws belong here, as their purpose was to make the Jews “different” and to serve as a testimony to their difference in the most intimate ancient setting, that of meal fellowship.

Another article on the Tektonics website, titled Deuteronomy and the JEDP thesis, considers the specific problem of interpreting Deuteronomy. A somewhat oblique passage considers the subtleties behind Yahweh’s crystal clear rules for killing apostates:

Chapter 13 contains a number of regulations concerning apostasy from the faith of Yahweh. Von Rad [VR.Dt, 15] supposes that these rules must have a late source because the chapter assumes that the apostasy is initiated by a prophet; and:

…(S)uch a suggestion can, after all, have come only from a class of prophets which was already seriously contaminated by Canaanite syncretism; moreover the nebiim (prophets) during Samuel’s time did not possess such a leading position in the people’s life.

Likewise, von Rad supposes that the misleading of an entire city is something that could only have happened under the monarchy.

Why was a “class” of prophets necessary? Did the position of “prophet” not exist before this time? Did not the Egyptians and the Canaanites and others well before Moses have alleged “prophets”? (Cf. Gen. 20:7 – the role of the prophet is “abundantly attested” in the ANE as one who was an “ambassador of the gods” – Merr.Dt, 230) Are not the social roles of the charismatic and the dupes one that has existed since time immemorial? Does syncretism wait for evolution? (Not according to the way modern cults operate!)

Sophisticated Christian theologian William Lane Craig makes the case for divinely ordered genocide, while speaking out against humanly decided genocide in this blog post:

Think of it! God stays His judgement of the Canaanite clans 400 years because their wickedness had not reached the point of intolerability! This is the long-suffering God we know in the Hebrew Scriptures. He even allows his own chosen people to languish in slavery for four centuries before determining that the Canaanite peoples are ripe for judgement and calling His people forth from Egypt.

By the time of their destruction, Canaanite culture was, in fact, debauched and cruel, embracing such practices as ritual prostitution and even child sacrifice. The Canaanites are to be destroyed “that they may not teach you to do according to all their abominable practices that they have done for their gods, and so you sin against the Lord your God” (Deut. 20.18). God had morally sufficient reasons for His judgement upon Canaan, and Israel was merely the instrument of His justice, just as centuries later God would use the pagan nations of Assyria and Babylon to judge Israel.

But why take the lives of innocent children? The terrible totality of the destruction was undoubtedly related to the prohibition of assimilation to pagan nations on Israel’s part. In commanding complete destruction of the Canaanites, the Lord says, “You shall not intermarry with them, giving your daughters to their sons, or taking their daughters for your sons, for they would turn away your sons from following me, to serve other gods” (Deut 7.3-4). This command is part and parcel of the whole fabric of complex Jewish ritual law distinguishing clean and unclean practices. To the contemporary Western mind many of the regulations in Old Testament law seem absolutely bizarre and pointless: not to mix linen with wool, not to use the same vessels for meat and for milk products, etc. The overriding thrust of these regulations is to prohibit various kinds of mixing. Clear lines of distinction are being drawn: this and not that. These serve as daily, tangible reminders that Israel is a special people set apart for God Himself.

In a subsequent post, I will discuss some of my objections to Christian apologetics (many of which will also apply to apologetics for other religious doctrines).

• Ignore all future prophets, for they are false prophets. You know, like Jesus or Mohammad.

• If any of your relatives urge you to worship “other Gods” then kill them and make sure everybody else hears about it so that all may fear. The instructions for dealing with atheists and agnostics are a little unclear, though the general tone suggests that even atheists are not to be spared.

• If you hear about other Gods emerging in any city, then investigate the matter. If it turns out to be true, destroy the city entirely.

While much of the violence in the Old Testament is more of the “show, don’t tell” variety, with Biblical heroes engaging in inspirational forms of violence, Deuteronomy Chapter 13 is one of the starkest examples of clear explicit unambiguous instructions to kill individuals and destroy cities if they don’t share a belief in and a desire to worship Yahweh.

This is the Bible that, according to Gallup polls over the last 20 years, somewhere between 25% and 35% of the US population claim to believe is the actual word of God and is meant to be taken literally (as I buzzed recently, and have reiterated in many previous blog posts). This is in contrast to about 45-50% of the US population that believes that the Bible is “inspired” by the word of God, and about 20% of the population that believes that the Bible is a collection of ancient fables, legends, and history recorded by Man. Other polls, such as a 2005 Rasmussen poll find a higher percentage of literal belief in the Bible — 63% — but this may partly be due to the absence of an attractive intermediate option.

So here is the logic:

• About 25% — or more– of people in the US claim to believe that the Bible is the actual word of God, meant to be taken literally. In sophisticated theological terms, they believe in the inerrancy of the Bible.

• Translations of the Bible into English and almost all other widely spoken languages are available for free online (here, here, here, here, and here, for starters) and in a wide variety of print formats readily accessible throughout the United States. Most people is the US, even if functionally illiterate, can understand spoken English or some other language spoken. Read-aloud versions and recordings of the Bible are also available (here and here, for instance). Thus, the people who claim to believe that the Bible are in a position to access the Bible.

• Deuteronomy Chapter 13 unequivocally commands people to kill those among their relatives who worship other Gods, and destroy entire cities if the worship of other Gods is found there.

Assuming the Gallup poll is correct, the implications are clear: these people either stand behind Deuteronomy Chapter 13, or they don’t know what is in the Bible despite claiming that it is the actual word of God and being able to readily access it, or they’re just lying to pollsters. None of these options seems particularly flattering.

In a subsequent blog post, I will mention some attempts by sophisticated Christians (of the Michael Novak type) to defend the Bible.

As far as I can see, “racism” and “nationalism” could occur at three levels (possibly more finer gradations are possible, but this is just a first pass):

1. Greater loyalty, or greater responsibility, or greater moral worth associated, to the members of one’s own (race/nation). These responsibilities are over and above your explicit job and family duties. The “nation” version of this is so common that specific examples are unnecessary. On the “race” side, the best example that I can find is American Renaissance which describes itself as a “race realist” magazine and whose editor, Jared Taylor, a US citizen who identifies himself as a “white nationalist.”

2. “Favoritism” to members of one’s own (race/nation) in jobs or positions or decisions where neutrality to others is a general norm.

3. Private (community-sanctioned, rather than just lone nutjob) or state-aided violence and state-backed coercion to enforce different norms, standards, and systems of laws for people based on their (race/nation).

Generally, when people argue against racism, they consider examples of (3): slavery with asymmetric treatment between races (so, for instance, slavery in the antebellum United States, where whites could own blacks), Jim Crow laws, apartheid in South Africa, and Nazism (in the last case, the “racism” was based on a fairly flimsy distinction between “races” but the rhetoric was still racial). Yet, they use this to condemn racism in all its forms, including (1).

On the other hand, when people talk of nationalism, they defend it using (1) (typically) arguing that nationalism is just an extension of the loyalties people tend to (and ought to) feel to their families and communities. Some of these justifications are based on biblical theology. Others have advocated philosophies such as citizenism (where a nation is viewed like a corporation, with loyalty being to current citizens — a position that needs to be considered in more detail separately).

And then they use it to justify things that fall under (3): immigration restrictions, war, trade restrictions, and more.

So are there good arguments against racism that do not apply to nationalism? I looked at the most common arguments against racism, and they apply just as well, or better, to nationalism.

Argument one: race does not exist

Viewed as a biological construct, race exists — as a fuzzy construct. Both genes and genealogies can be used to identify different clusters of gene frequencies for different racial groups, and these clusterings match, to quite an extent, the “man-on-the-street” classifications of race (here’s a picture on Wikipedia of various ethnic groups in the US, here’s a picture on Wikipedia of a genetic distance map. In other words, race does exist.

Some people argue that race is a “social construct.” There is clearly both a biological and a social construct at play. But in so far as nationalism goes, nations are almost entirely social constructs, and have no innate biological meaning. And given the migration between nations, nationalities are more subject to change than race. So, if the fuzziness of race is a reason to discount race as having moral worth, the fuzziness of nationality should be a reason to reject nationality altogether as a basis of moral worth.

Argument two: race may exist in a purely genetic or genealogical sense, but it has no correlation with the way people are

This is again false. A number of physical traits as well as sensitivities to medicines are correlated with race. So are a number of character and personality traits. Correlations of this kind have been observed consistently across a variety of host populations. To what extent these correlations arise as a result of the differences in frequencies of genes, and to what extent through the influence of culture and geography, is still hotly debated (see the Snyderman and Rothman study for instance). Again, the answer may differ from trait to trait (with the likelihood of genetic explanations for racial differences in skin pigmentation being quite likely).

Turning once again to the comparison with nationality, is the argument that nationality explains individual differences any more compelling than the argument that race does? True, productivity differs widely across nations, but this has little to do with the workers as indivudals — the income boost arising from an unskilled person moving from Ghana to the United States is huge.

In this context, it is worth noting that while a person who raises the hypothesis of racial differences of any sort can face some pretty strong negative reactions, a politician can blithely call his nation the world’s best, most hard working, and most productive nation without invoking either moral outrage or factual questioning of any sort.

Slippery slope arguments

Racism, it is argued, generates a slippery slope to slavery, unequal treatment, i.e., (1) leads to (2) leads to (3). Again, the parallel with nationalism is hard not to notice. Nationalism justifies immigration restrictions that prevent poor people from escaping terrible economic conditions, in practice sentencing them to a life of poverty, in order to prevent the wages of high school dropouts in developed countries from dropping by 8%. Nationalism is also causally implicated in wars, which, until about 1950, regularly racked Europe and many other parts of the world.

Consider also that racism, while harmful to some individuals, cannot get lethal unless it is backed by violence — violence either imposed by the state or by private parties while the state looks the other way. Thus, as long as governments aim to stay out of the racial fray, individuals with racist attitudes are limited in the damage they can do. Nationalism, on the other hand, is an ideology to support and glorify the very institution — national government — that has a de facto and de jure monopoly on the use of violence.

Any racist worth his or her salt, who wants racism to make a dent, tries to frame racism in nationalist terms — hence notions such as “white nationalism” and its counterparts. The Ku Klux Klan in the United States, which is perhaps most famous for its attitudes toward black Americans, was a white nationalist and white supremacist group that opposed not just Blacks but also white immigrants, particularly Catholic immigrants. Defenders of apartheid in South Africa appealed to similar sentiments. The most famous example of racism — Hitler — was firs and foremost an example of national socialism.

Less known examples illustrate the point — the “racism” that led many newly independent governments in East Africa to expel or mistreat Indian and Arab traders who had settled there was also a form of “nationalism” (for instance, expulsion of Asians from Uganda).

Indoctrination

While there may be some conceptual and moral differences between racism and nationalism, these seem insufficient to explain the huge gap between the purported prevalence of these. Consider, for instance, four possible combinations:

1. Non-racists, non-nationalists

2. Racists, non-nationalists

3. Nationalists, non-racists

4. Racist nationalists

From the logic of things, I might expect that (2) and (3) would be roughly equal in strength, and (4) would be somewhat rarer than both. In practice, we find that (2) is almost non-existent, (1) and (4) are rare, and (3) is prevalent.

The simplest explanation for this is that nationalism has access to a much more successful propaganda machine. Governments control school curricula, which typically follow a pro-government and pro-nationalist line. These school curricula reinforce nationalist lessons that parents, peers, and the media impart. The first four “fundamental duties” in the Indian constitution state:

1. To abide by the Constitution and respect its ideals and institutions, the National Flag and the National Anthem

2. To cherish and follow the noble ideals which inspired our national struggle for freedom

3. To uphold and protect the sovereignty, unity and integrity of India

4. To defend the country and render national service when called upon to do so.

High school history/civics lessons may be decidedly anodyne, but the constant reinforcement of national greatness is hard to miss. The situation isn’t unique to India; see here and here for some US perspectives.

Continuous complaints about “anti-national” content in school curricula have some merit, but they don’t undermine the point I’m making here. If a person opposes the inclusion of A as anti-national, that’s usually just shorthand for saying that he considers the inclusion of A to be a negative for the nation and hence opposes its inclusion in the curriculum. But this misses the point that those who supported the inclusion of A may not be being anti-national; rather, they believe that including A is a positive for the nation. To take an example, pro-religion nationalists typically see negative statements made about popular religions in the nation as “anti-national”, but anti-religion nationalists see these negative statements as a way of propagating what they consider the right style of nationalism. The very fact that, in most curriculum debates, anti-nationalism is something that each side accuses the other of but no side admits to engaging by themselves, indicates that nationalist propaganda has been remarkably successful.

Preference falsification

The likely truth though is that, across the world, people’s support for nationalism is just as flimsy and superficial as the support for racism was in the American Jim Crow South prior to the Civil Rights Era. The “extreme democratic” view may be that people in the American South were racists till the 1950s, so voted to keep Jim Crow legislation, then civil rights demonstrations caused a change of heart, and then in about 20 years, they all became non-racists, hence it would be very hard to re-introduce any of this legislation. The truth is likely less extreme.

Probably, although there were some principled racists back in the 1950s and before, many people supported these laws because everybody did it — an example of status quo bias — and also because the social and psychological cost of speaking out against these laws was nontrivial.

This deserves explanation. When a decision is made collectively, an individual who does not agree with the collective and cannot opt out of the collective decision cannot reap the benefits of making a decision better than what the collective would have made. The individual thus has little incentive to actually think about how to decide better. On the other hand, the social and psychological costs of defying the collective are very real.

In Linda Gorman’s essay on discrimination, she quotes from Jennifer Roback’s article:

The resistance of southern streetcar companies to ordinances requiring them to segregate black passengers vividly illustrates how the market motivates businesses to avoid unfair discrimination. Before the segregation laws were enacted, most streetcar companies voluntarily segregated tobacco users, not black people. Nonsmokers of either race were free to ride where they wished, but smokers were relegated to the rear of the car or to the outside platform. The revenue gains from pleased nonsmokers apparently outweighed any losses from disgruntled smokers.

Streetcar companies refused, however, to discriminate against black people because separate cars would have reduced their profits. They resisted even after the passage of turn-of-the-century laws requiring the segregation of black people.

(more at the link)

To avoid the social and psychological costs of disagreeing with the collective, people tend to falsify their preferences — fool themselves and others that certain things are true or good. This preference falsification can lead to interesting consequences — it means that a certain critical mass of dissenters can lead large numbers of people to switch their preferences — explaining perhaps part of how revolutions can give the appearance of a massive change in people’s attitudes.

This analysis would have interesting implications for nationalism. First, it means that, like racism in the 1950s, the strength of people’s belief in nationalism is probably overstated. While there are probably true patriots out there, many people voice nationalistic sentiments to avoid the social and psychological costs of not doing so. Part of this also involves fooling themselves about the virtues or moral inevitability of nationalism, so that there is no dissimulation involved. This might also explain why people claim undying fealty to their country yet have little hesitation leaving for other lands in order to seek education, earn a higher income, or reap tax benefits.

Here, I’ll try to elaborate a little more on what I meant. Before doing that, I do want to acknowledge that I consider Peter Singer a fairly conscientious and thorough moral philosopher who does not hesitate to follow his own arguments through, and has verified his arguments using fairly rigorous procedures. Understandably, then, it isn’t surprising that I agree with the logic of his argument. My disagreement is with the intuition that premises the argument.

Singer’s argument:non-normative version

Here’s a non-normative formulation of Singer’s argument. Let’s say, for the sake of simplicity, that the cost of surely saving the life of a child in the developing world is $800, and you know that making such a donation will save an additional child’s life. This is a fairly conservative estimate. Here, for instance, is GiveWell’s overview of VillageReach estimating that unrestricted donations to VillageReach save a life for somewhere in the cost range of $400-$800, with a cautious pessimistic set of assumptions.

Now, let’s say that, with your current income and financial situation, you are willing to pay $1000 to save the life of a stranger (that’s your reservation price). The fact that you can save a life for $800 means that you could donate $800 to save that life and get some version of an “altruist surplus” of $200. Now, you’re a little poorer than you were before, so your reservation price for saving a child’s life goes down, may be to $980. Still, that is more than the cost of saving a child’s life, so you go ahead and make another donation. Each time you make a donation, your finances change and the maximum amount you are willing to pay to save a life goes down. After making, say, 30 such donations, you get to the point where your reservation price is below the cost of saving a child’s life, so you make no more donations.

What are the implications of this argument? If you value saving a stranger child’s life at more than the “going rate” then it makes sense for you to donate to save that child’s life, and to keep donating until the value you attach to saving the child’s life drops to below the going rate for saving the child’s life.

So far, so good. Some modifications and caveats may be in order. For instance, just because a particular donation saves a child’s life for less than your reservation price does not mean you should make that particular donation. If another donation saves a child’s life for even less, making that donation creates an even larger “altruism surplus” which could also imply more lives saved. Still, the basic argument seems strong to me.

Bootstrapping: the ethical obligation

Singer adds a normative element when he argues that there is an ethical obligation to give. More precisely, in the model above, Singer is arguing that there is an ethical obligation to set a certain minimum reservation price as a function of one’s income or wealth. In its more extreme form, Singer’s argument is that the reservation price should be roughly (how much money I have) – (how much money would satisfy my basic needs). By this exacting standard, the amount of money that millionaires are entitled to keep after donating to save lives is no more than the amount that thousandaires are entitled to keep — possibly a bit more if that “kept” money is necessary for expenditures that help them earn their huge salaries.

In the more moderate form, Singer suggests a scheme where, in fact, richer people do have an obligation to donate more, and also a larger share of their income/wealth, but they also get to “keep” more of it.

What I disagree with is this normative element — the idea that there is an ethical obligation to set a minimum reservation price for the life of a stranger.

Differing intuitions from differing examples

Singer helps build the case for an ethical obligation by considering the example of saving a drowning child at the risk of damaging your shoes (here’s the original essay):

Imagine you come across a small child who has fallen into a pond and is in danger of drowning. You know that you can easily and safely rescue him, but you are wearing an expensive pair of shoes that will be ruined if you do. We all think it would be seriously wrong to walk on past the pond, leaving the child to drown, because you don’t want to have to buy a new pair of shoes – in fact, most people think that would be monstrous. You can’t compare a child’s life with a pair of shoes!

Certainly, many people would agree with Singer that this is indeed monstrous. Consider, on the other hand, a different intuition that Bryan Caplan appeals to when discussing ethical obligations to strangers (original post):

What are you morally required to do for a stranger? Not much. Even if he seems hungry and asks you for food, you’re probably within your rights to refuse. If you’ve ever been in a large city, you’ve refused to help the homeless on more than one occasion. And even if you think you broke your moral obligation to give, your moral obligation wasn’t strong enough to let the beggar justifiably mug you.

Notice: These common-sense ethics regarding strangers, ethics that almost everyone admits, are unequivocally libertarian. Yes, you have an obligation to leave strangers alone, but charity is optional.

In a sense, Singer and Caplan both introduce a number of what we may consider “non-essential” features into the situation that tend to bias responses. For instance, Singer refers to: (i) a child who is not of the age to be considered responsible for his actions, (ii) in a clear life-and-death situation, (iii) with no other person clearly responsible for the child around, and (iv) where the action to be undertaken is the kind that many would impulsively take. Caplan, writing from the developed world, uses the example of strangers whom one is likely to meet in the developed world — who are mostly (i) adults who may be considered at least somewhat responsible for their actions, (ii) in situations where there is no clear danger of threat, (iii) in places and situations where they have a number of other alternatives, and (iv) where there are many easy-to-anticipate unintended consequences of the action to be undertaken.

There are two ways “out” of Singer’s conclusions. The first is to argue that the special circumstances that arise in Singer’s example do make it different from the general situation he discusses. In other words, you do have an ethical obligation to save the child in the circumstances described by Singer, but you do not have an ethical obligation to donate to life-saving charities, because of one or more of the reasons outlined here (or variants, such as the idea that there is an immediate geographical vicinity within which each individual has responsibility, and not beyond). This is the route that many people take.

Personally, I am not convinced of this way “out” of Singer’s conclusions, since I think that the special features identified, while good enough to explain people’s instinctive reactions, are not relevant from the perspective of a universal morality. Hence, my conclusion is that even in the case outlined by Singer, there is no ethical obligation to save the child (even if it is monstrous not to do so). Here are some minor modifications to consider:

• One of your neighbors needs a thousand dollars for a life-saving operation for her daughter. She has tried all other ways of raising the money but failed. You can donate a thousand dollars and are unlikely to feel the pinch. Do you have an ethical obligation to donate?

• You can choose either of two routes to walk to work. On one of the routes, there is a pond in sight where children frequently drown — you estimate that about 5% of the times you take that route, you will be in a position to save a drowning child, but you will be fairly late for work. Are you obliged to take that route?