Frederick the Great of Prussia |
The Divine Perspective
License to Bloviate
Thursday, July 26, 2012
Wednesday, July 25, 2012
Rediscovering Our Inner *r*epublicans: Humility and Politics in an Irrational World, Part I
[Apologies for the hiatus. How dare real life intrude on the blogosphere?]
In this experimental first month of The Divine Perspective's existence, I've focused a lot on irrationality in politics. I've argued that our analytic lens for politics should be tinted by emotion, not policy preferences. I've linked to Larrie Ferreiro discussing the biological roots of our political behavior; our political beliefs tend to be rooted in our evolved disposition toward group interaction, not some rationalistic reflection on political philosophy. We've seen Jonah Lehrer observe that education doesn't reduce our tendency to fall victim to cognitive biases.
In short, I think our society tends to think about politics in overly rationalistic terms. We attempt to reduce social behavior to a simple link between aggregated personal preferences and group action. But politics doesn't actually work that way.
In this experimental first month of The Divine Perspective's existence, I've focused a lot on irrationality in politics. I've argued that our analytic lens for politics should be tinted by emotion, not policy preferences. I've linked to Larrie Ferreiro discussing the biological roots of our political behavior; our political beliefs tend to be rooted in our evolved disposition toward group interaction, not some rationalistic reflection on political philosophy. We've seen Jonah Lehrer observe that education doesn't reduce our tendency to fall victim to cognitive biases.
In short, I think our society tends to think about politics in overly rationalistic terms. We attempt to reduce social behavior to a simple link between aggregated personal preferences and group action. But politics doesn't actually work that way.
Monday, July 23, 2012
Santucci's Unpretentious Blogging Capital: Aurora and the Limits of Policy
The shooting that occurred at the premier of The Dark
Knight Rises was a very sad event, and naturally the immediate response was
policy. The twitterverse blew up almost immediately with calls for stiffer gun
control, which was of course to be expected. On MSNBC, a survivor said her
father, on discovering she'd survived, said he would have killed the shooter,
giving a blunt articulation of what the anti-gun regulation lobby says should
have happened. E.J. Dionne Jr. then decided to take the predictable liberal
line: we need to talk about this and come up with a policy. All of this misses
the boat.
In the first case, the link between gun control and
decreased gun crimes is almost impossible to isolate. This NYT
article following the 2008 ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller does a
solid job covering the arguments for and against guns and the difficulty in
making arguments out of the raw data available. This passage, in particular, is
instructive:
According
to the study, published last year in The Harvard Journal
of Law and Public Policy, European nations with more guns had lower murder
rates. As summarized in a brief filed by several criminologists and other
scholars supporting the challenge to the Washington law, the seven nations with
the most guns per capita had 1.2 murders annually for every 100,000 people. The
rate in the nine nations with the fewest guns was 4.4.
Justice Breyer was skeptical about
what these comparisons proved. “Which is the cause and which the effect?” he
asked. “The proposition that strict gun laws cause crime is harder to accept than the proposition that
strict gun laws in part grow out of the fact that a nation already has a higher
crime rate.”
One study cited in the article showed a link between
background checks and a decreased murder rate, but Colorado already requires
vendors to perform background checks before transferring possession of
firearms.
On the other side, no one was going to take down the shooter
with a concealed handgun. I doubt many of the film's attendees thought to bring
their gas masks with them, so the tear gas the shooter threw before he started
shooting would have decreased their ability to aim accurately. Second, reports
have all emphasized that the shooter was covered head to toe in body armor,
including a neck guard. The shooter was the only person who could breathe and
the only person who could fire blind without worrying about hitting the wrong
person since for him there were no wrong people.
E.J.
Dionne's article means well, but who cares? He expresses outrage and a
sense we ought to, you know, do something and makes some inane
analogies. This is the critical passage:
First, the gun lobby goes straight to the exploitation argument —
which is, of course, a big lie. You can see this because we never allow an
assertion of this kind to stop conversation on other issues.
Nobody who points to the inadequacy of our flood-control policies
or mistakes by the Army Corps of Engineers is accused of “exploiting” the
victims of a deluge. Nobody who criticizes a botched response by the Federal
Emergency Management Agency to a natural disaster is accused of “exploiting”
the victims of a hurricane or a tornado. Nobody who lays part of the blame for
an accident on insufficient regulation of, say, the airlines or coal mining is
accused of “exploiting” the accident’s victims.
The difference, of course,
between deluges, hurricanes, and tornadoes is that each of those is a consistent,
predictable kind of disaster, while gun massacres are variable. Designing
policies to stop the general case of gun massacres may not have any impact on
stopping people like James Holmes, or the Virginia Tech shooter, or the
Columbine shooter. Policy deals with general cases, big phenomena. This is
something different.
It'd be nice to believe that
we can use our political system to make the world more stable or make events
like Friday's make sense, but we're not dealing with an institutional problem
here. These mass shootings are still incredibly rare and, relative to yearly
deaths, not all that significant – those killed in the Aurora shooting
represent less than half a day's quota for annual gun deaths in the U.S.
If we design a policy as a
response, it shouldn't be designed to stop gun deaths like those that happened
in Aurora. Mass shootings are already rare enough by virtue of being mass
shootings that we don't have to design policy to stop them, and whatever policy
we do design will be completely unable to predict the particulars of the next
one. If we want to do something (!), we ought to focus on the other
729/730ths of gun deaths each year.
---by James Santucci
---by James Santucci
Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Programming Note
Friday, July 13, 2012
Thursday, July 12, 2012
Daily Reading: July 12, 2012
Wednesday, July 11, 2012
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