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What’s So Great about Democracy?

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Among some philosophers of the left, a popular heuristic for both critiquing existing social and political frameworks as well as proposing new ones is the ability of “the people” to define and shape their lives and their shared conception of the good. This is contrasted with the market, which is seen as atomistic, selfish, and prone to manipulation by small classes of powerful and wealthy actors. If only we could have more of a say in way our lives are lived, they argue, we could get past such horribles as poverty, racism, sexism, and consumerism.

What’s needed is more democracy. Democracy is the very embodiment of the people’s will. If we want more of that will reflected in our institutions, democracy is how to achieve it. Democracy is America’s great civil religion. Our politicians love pointing out that their pet policies represent “the will of the American people” or “what the people want.” But is democracy always and everywhere a good thing? And is it an end in itself? Is democracy a primary good?

A great deal of political rhetoric says yes. Much crude communitarian thinking, for instance, seeks only to maximize how many decisions are made collectively. Participatory economics (“parecon” to its fans) would have us turn over all questions of production to hierarchies of citizen councils, each voting on what kinds of shoes to make and, presumably, whether to manufacture iPods or Zunes.

Lost in this rush to promote democracy-for-the-sake-of-democracy is the crucial question of what, exactly, democracy’s good for. This means answering not one question, but two. First, if we are want to make a given decision politically, what’s the best way to do that? The answer to this one’s easy for democracy fetishists: Democratically! But the second question, if we’re honest with ourselves, is a little more difficult: What sorts of decisions should be made politically?

I’ve lost track of the number of classroom discussions I had during my undergraduate and law school years that saw the students, at the prompting of the professor, advocating popular control over this or that. We need to take power away from the corporations, the wealthy, the elite, and give it back to the people. If only the people could decide, we’d forever ameliorate life’s slings and arrows. But what I don’t recall is much of any talk about whether all these decisions–family structure, organic food, shoes, iPods, or Zunes–ought to be made by the people. The people, after all, means a majority, which means “made by the people” really entails some forcing their will upon others. (If everyone agreed, there’d be no need to vote because people would already be doing what we hoped to vote for.)

In fact, on those occasions when I raised the second question–”Which decisions ought to be made politically?”–I’d often get a quite interesting response. It wasn’t “all of them” or even a qualified “some of them.” Rather, professors would dispute the very coherence of question itself. Why? Because there are no decisions that aren’t political. Everything is politics and so everything is a political decision. And if every decision is a political decision, then asking which decisions should be political is as downright strange as asking which decisions are decisions. Within this ontology, it’s easy to then get to democracy as an end in itself.

Except that nobody really believes the conclusion of that line of thinking. If all decisions are political decisions and all political decisions should be made democratically, then it follows that all decisions should be made democratically. Which, I feel comfortable repeating, no one believes.

If democratic decisions always produce the right results, then democratic decision-making is always best. But majority voting obviously won’t always produce the best results. Majorities can hate minorities and want to deprive them of property, liberty, and life. What the democracy-über-alles folks really mean, then, is that democracy–true democracy–will always produce the results the democracy-über-alles proponents support. If the majority votes for something abhorrent, then it isn’t that democracy has led to a bad result but that democracy was prevented–by some nefarious agent–from properly functioning. (In other words, the people didn’t actually want what the people voted for.) Thus we can only ever know if democracy is really, truly working the way it’s supposed to by looking at the results and matching them to our own, intuitive (and often unprincipled) sense of what’s right and wrong.

The person who answers that all decisions are political decisions and thus ought to be made democratically, then, is making a simple error. He’s equating ”democracy” with “my own views.” He’s falling prey to an aspect of the politics of taste.

Democracy is not a primary good. It is not the means to answer all political and economic decisions. Democracy is a valuable method for often getting at the “right” answer to many–or even most–kinds of political questions. But we should always remember that democracy means forcing the will of some upon others and making collectively those decisions that might better be made individually. In this way, it often clashes with autonomy and treats (many) individuals as means, not ends.

For any given decision–about how to structure our lives, how to relate to one another, how and what to pay for or support–we shouldn’t rush to vote. Rather, we should ask whether some people should have any right to make this decision for others.

Democracy’s good for a lot–but there’s a lot democracy isn’t good for.

The Politics of Taste

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Here’s some questions of taste: Do you like smoking? Do you smoke yourself? Does it bother you when others do it? Do you like bicycling? Or do you wish all those hippies on bikes would get out of the road?

Now here are two questions of politics: Should we ban smoking, even in private restaurants and bars? Should we build more bike lanes?

It’s quite obvious that if we tallied up answers to the first set of questions and compared them to the second, we’d find a high degree of overlap. People who like smoking will oppose smoking bans. People who can’t stand bicycling will vote against bike lanes and other “pedestrian-friendly” policies.

These relationships extend throughout the political sphere. Foodies want to prohibit soda machines and force inner-city grocery stores to carry more vegetables. Urban-living aficionados want to build rail lines and end subsidies that make living in suburbia cheaper. Music-lovers want funding for public school music programs, while artists think kids should spend more time in school painting.

Many, if not most, political disagreements are not, in fact, the result of differing ideologies or interpretations of the facts. Instead, they are matters of personal preferences masquerading as policy issues. They are questions of taste thrust into the realm of the political.

This “politics of taste” can be found everywhere, even though advocates of it rarely admit that’s what they’re doing. The foodie doesn’t push for fresh vegetables by saying, “I like the taste of vegetables and so think everyone should eat more of them.” Instead, he offers policy arguments about nutrition or sustainability. Most importantly, politics-of-tasters discount the extent to which tastes genuinely differ.

Stripped of specifics, the basic politics of taste argument looks like this:

Some people say they prefer Y over X. I am smart and well-informed and free from nefarious influence, and I prefer X over Y. Thus all people who are smart and well-informed and free from nefarious influence will also prefer X over Y. Therefore, anyone who chooses Y must be stupid, ignorant, or under the influence of nefarious agents. In other words, anyone who would choose Y isn’t in the proper mental state to make good choices. Given all that, I should use the political process to choose for them, giving them X, even though they (say they) prefer Y.

Notice the use of “choose” instead of “prefer” in the sentence about other people. That’s important. Key to the politics of taste is the idea that other people really prefer the same things I prefer. However, for reasons having to do with ignorance or immorality or indoctrination, they are lead to choose that which they don’t prefer.

But what if the political process–an election, say–results in Y winning out over X? What if democracy leads to policies that run counter to my (enlightened, informed, obviously-correct) tastes? Well, then there must be something wrong with the process. It wasn’t truly democratic. Too much money in politics, the influence of labor unions, fear of reprisal by bosses or family members, or “false consciousness” have lead everyone who voted for Y to vote against their genuine interests. Obviously, the only thing to do is to fix those systemic errors in the political system and assure that, in the future, the obviously-better X wins out over the obviously-inferior Y.

The politics of taste coupled with politics as moral posturing is the chief cause of the unproductiveness of much political debate. If we want fecund debate, we need to understand the best arguments for opposing views and critically evaluate our own positions.

But when politics are really a matter of personal tastes and when we invest our political views with undue moral weight, we end up with little reason to understand the arguments of others or to doubt our own political stance.

Surprise! Your Politics (Probably) Aren’t Based on Principle

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You hold your political beliefs because they’re correct, of course. If only other people would look at the evidence—really look at it—they’d find that it supports your position. If only they’d follow reasonable lines of thought to their unbiased conclusion, they’d find that you’ve been right all along.

Of course, this is what you believe about yourself. Other people—those blow-hards, bleeding hearts, or extremist loonies—who don’t share your political stance must’ve come to different conclusions not because they really looked at the evidence and followed reasonable lines of thought to their unbiased conclusions. No, those other people are just stupid or evil. They’re stupid because they’ve misinterpreted the evidence—and that evidence is so clear that only an imbecile would do that. Or they’re evil because they hold to a moral system repugnant to all that is good and humane, a moral system that leads them to such obviously wrong politics.

All of which is, in the case of the great portion of those of us with political opinions, utter bullshit. Progressives aren’t progressive because they carefully and without bias considered the evidence and found progressivism to most closely match it. Conservatives aren’t conservative because they carefully and without bias considered the evidence and found conservatism to most closely match it. Instead, there’s something else going on—and it has nothing to do with principled investigation leading to reasonable conclusions.

The Geography of Political Preference

To immediately see what’s wrong with the politics-as-principle idea, we need only ask ourselves why political persuasions map so well geographically. Why are urban areas (typically) blue, while rural are (typically) red? Why is nearly every college campus filled with progressives, while every mega-church is filled with conservatives? Why is the middle chunk of America overrun with red states, while the coasts mirror the blue of their sea shores?

Before positing answers to those questions, though, let’s temporarily abandon politics and turn to something much less likely to cause rioting in the streets. Why do people throughout the south dig country music, but folks in upscale urban areas throughout the north loathe the stuff?

It can’t be genetics. Americans move around all the time, so if there were an overriding genetic component to musical taste, you’d expect to see interests spread relatively evenly. But does that mean that listeners objectively sampled every musical genre, comparing its qualities, and decided which was most appealing on an individual by individual basis? Of course not. For most of us, we like the music we like because that’s what our friends like. If everyone in your high school can’t get enough Kenny Chesney, chances are you’ll fill your iPod with country, too. But if they’re instead fans of Jay-Z, then you’re more likely than not to develop a fondness for hip-hop.

This isn’t just because we tend to like what we’re exposed to, though that is part of it. What’s guiding much of our musical taste is a desire to fit in. We want to like the same things our friends like because we want our friends to like us. Only a very few are legitimately non-conformists—and those who are tend to be outcasts because nobody can figure out how to relate to them. The rest of us want to share tastes because it gives us something to talk about, something to agree on, something to share and experience together.

This tendency to conform isn’t necessarily conscious, either. Few of us say, “I want to fit in so I’m going to buy the same records as the cool kids.” In fact, the people do consciously shift their tastes to match their social environment are often looked down upon as poseurs and ridiculed for “not being themselves.” No, we instead do our conforming very much unconsciously. We think we really do like heavy metal or Christianity or high school football because those varieties of music, religion, or sport are the best. We don’t realize that they’re the “best” because they’re the ones, in our particular circumstances, it feels the best to like. And it feels the best to like them because, in liking them, we share them with our peers.

That’s why musical tastes appear geographically. It’s also why communities share political views.

Politics as Conformist Moral Posturing

These pressures are even greater when it comes to political beliefs. Unlike music and sports, politics provoke moral judgements. The weird kid who only listens to New Wave is just weird. But the guy who thinks the government shouldn’t collectively bargain with its public employees is one tiny step away from Hitler.

Political taste, then, drives us toward conformity and in-group/out-group thinking much, much more than music or clothing–or even, in many cases, religion. Because politics is so caught up in morality, and because all of us like to see ourselves as moral people, we come to associate being moral with having certain political views. This insulates our political opinions, whatever they might happen to be, from evidence and argumentation. If we admit that organic food isn’t healthier and better for the planet or that illegal immigrants aren’t the cause of all of America’s economic woes, we’re not only changing our political views, but we’re undermining our very own moral foundations.

We want to fit in. We want to be liked. We want to be good, decent people. And feeling all of those things about ourselves demands seeing ourselves as reflected in the judgements of our peers. Thus we have a deep and powerful motivation to profess beliefs that will be judged kindly by our peers. And there is no better way to convincingly profess a belief than to actually believe it.

That is why political debate almost always turns rancorous. And it is why, for most of us, our politics aren’t actually based on principle.

The Sound and Fury of Holmes and Sunstein’s “The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes”

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Stephen Holmes and Cass R. Sunstein’s The Cost of Rights: Why Liberty Depends on Taxes presents itself as, among other things, a rebuttal to libertarianism. Its scope is, of course, broader. The authors also want to get the goat of progressives who would underestimate the economic burdens created by government. The book is well-written and entertaining but, ultimately, a good deal less groundbreaking, revolutionary, or even intriguing than Holmes and Sunstein seem to think.

Stripped of the countless supporting examples and anecdotes, the basic argument of The Cost of Rights is this:

  1. There’s a difference between natural rights and legal rights. Natural rights preexist government. They’re fixed and, well, natural. We can argue about what they are, but we can’t make up new ones. Natural rights can be discussed within a positive liberty vs. negative liberty context.
  2. Legal rights can’t preexist government, because they are a) constructs of the state and its laws and b) claims by individuals upon the government (for services, for protection, for enforcement, etc.). Legal rights can’t meaningfully be broken into negative and positive sorts because even those rights that say we have a “right to not be X,” actually mean “we have a right to demand that government actively protect us from X.” (E.g., a right not to be killed is really a right to be protected, by the government, from being killed.) So, in this sense, all legal rights are positive rights.
  3. Because all legal rights demand something from government and that something means government must expend resources (on enforcement officers, on buildings to station them, on infrastructure, an so on), legal rights depend on taxes.
  4. Most things we think of as legal rights (e.g., the right to contract, to protection from violence, to private property and its enforcement) are only meaningful (i.e., can only be relied on to exist and be protected) if government expends resources to protect them. This means that a) government must exist and b) government must collect resources (taxes).

The bulk of the book’s 250 pages is paragraph after paragraph in the form of, “We have a right to contract, but that demands courts and police and politicians drafting contract law and judges interpreting it. And all that costs money,” followed by another like, “We have a right to be protected against theft, but that means police and courts and…” One gets the point quite quickly.

An Infinite Regress?

My colleague, Tom G. Palmer, wrote a scathing review of the book (pdf). Among his many critiques are that The Cost of Rights amounts to an infinite regress.

For there ever to be a right of any sort, by Holmes and Sunstein’s own theory, there would have to be an infinite hierarchy of people threatening to punish those lower in the hierarchy. Since there is no infinite hierarchy, we are forced to conclude that Holmes and Sunstein have actually offered an impossibility theorem of rights in the logical form of modus tollens: If there are rights, then there must bean infinite hierarchy of power; there is not an infinite hierarchy of power; therefore there are no rights.

I find this particular problem with Holmes and Sunstein’s thesis less troubling than Tom does. We have a right not to be abused by the police. To which Holmes and Sunstein respond, “Okay, so that means we need tax dollars spent on people watching the police for bad conduct and enforcing the laws against the police.” Tom’s infinite regress criticism means saying, “Ah ha! But who watches the watchers? Thus we need another layer of people enforcing the laws against the people enforcing the laws against the police.” And so on, for ever and ever.

From the standpoint of strict logic, Tom’s rebuttal works. There is an infinite regress here. But it doesn’t bother me because, in terms of practical, in-the-world effects, Holmes and Sunstein have a reasonable response. Namely, with each additional layer, the protection gets better. Not all police will abuse us. If, say, 10% of police do abuse citizens and that’s without one layer of additional protection, then perhaps only 1% will do it with one layer of protection. We’re getting closer to absolute protection of our right not to be tortured by the police. A second layer might reduce the rate of abuse to 0.1%. A third to 0.01%, and so on. At some point, even though our protection isn’t absolute, it’s close enough. Thus we avoid the infinite regress.

… Signifying Nothing?

So if the infinite regress left me unvexed, and if I approach the argument in the very abstract form presented in the four points above (and accept without question the natural/legal rights distinction and the conclusions drawn from it), what’s the takeaway from The Cost of Rights? Unfortunately, not a lot. Because Holmes and Sunstein haven’t really offered an argument against much of anything, especially not mainstream libertarianism.

In responding to The Cost of Rights, the libertarian can adopt one of two tactics. The first is to say, “Yep, we do need people to protect our rights, but why do they have to be the government?” In other words, to raise the anarcho-capitalist explanations of how rights protections and the rule of law could happen without the state. The book never addresses this possibility. It just assumes–without acknowledging the assumption–that “protection” and “enforcement” can only ever be the provence of the state. They may be right–many libertarians are not anarchists–but the idea of the state as the only effective rights protector is by no means a priori true.

The second tactic is to say, “So what?” Just because we need the state to protect rights doesn’t mean we need this huge state we have now. Minarchist libertarians, for example, say that yes we need the state to protect our rights and yes we need to pay the state to do that through taxation (or voluntary payments), but the state should be limited to protecting our natural rights and enforcing contracts and providing defense and that’s it. In this sense, the overarching, adumbrated argument of The Cost of Rights given above is, when it comes down to it, compatible with minarchism.

In fact, when Holmes and Sunstein attack “libertarians” and “limited-government” folks (they use the terms interchangeably), it’s clear that what they actually mean is “anarchists.” In other words, they think libertarians want no state and attacks them for holding that obviously (to them) silly position.

The Cost of Rights fails to genuinely wrestle with the actual arguments of its opponents.

“Why End the World?” A Writer’s Perspective on the Post-Apocalypse Genre

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Post-apocalyptic fiction is kind of hot right now. My first novel, The Hole, fits the genre and my publisher, Permuted Press, puts out pretty much nothing but post-apocalyptic stories. Recently, someone asked me why the genre is so popular.

While I have thoughts on an answer from a reader’s perspective–the end of the world is scary stuff, we like the thought of beginning anew, etc.–what I want to offer here is a writer’s answer. Why is The Hole a post-apocalyptic novel?

There’s certainly no reason the story I tell in The Hole couldn’t play out just as well in a non-apocalyptic setting. Nothing in the plot demands that the characters begin their journey in a world wiped out by plague. Nothing in it dictates that the crazies wander through a barren landscape instead of a densely-populated, modern-day America.

I could argue that the post-apocalyptic setting adds to the loneliness of my two main characters. I could tell you that placing the events of The Hole after the end of the world focuses attention on what really matters: the plight of Elliot Bishop and Evajean Rhodes and the mystery they set out to solve. All of which is probably true. But it’s not what ultimately decided the issues for me. It’s not why I went post-apocalypse.

No, I chose to write about the end of the world because it’s easier.

Writing a novel is a ton of work. Telling a long story involves keeping track of hundreds of details of plot and character and setting, while not bogging down in those details to such an extent that the story suffers. Telling a long, complex story is terrifically difficult–and I am in awe of writers who can pull it off. (This is why it’s so lamentable that the typical university English literature education spends so much time studying imagery and symbolism and ideology and characterization–and spends practically no classroom hours on pacing and story.)

Ending the world gives the writer freedom to ignore a great deal of those details. If your main characters are the only people left, then they’re the only people you have to worry about. In a fully populated world, the events of The Hole would’ve caused all sorts of ongoing reactions by governments, organizations, and individuals. I’d have had to keep track of all that and work it in to the specific story of Elliot and Evajean. Far simpler, then, to just kill off all the governments, organizations, and individuals.

As an author approaching my first novel, the post-apocalyptic genre was a sandbox that gave me room to play while allowing me the luxury of not having to keep track of too much at once. (Though the editing process revealed just how much there still was to keep track of–and how poorly I managed to do so in the first draft.)

I’m sure other authors have better, less self-servings reasons for ending the world than “it makes the writing easier.” But, if I’m honest with myself, I have to admit that it was mine.

Frank Rich, Al Jazeera, and Silly Analogies

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Over at the New York Times last week, Frank Rich got all kinds of mad at the American mainstream news’s coverage of the Egyptian uprising. The corporate media overplayed the Facebook/Twitter “revolution.” They continued “the legacy of years of self-censored, superficial, provincial and at times Islamophobic coverage of the Arab world in a large swath of American news media.”

All of which might be true. American’s aren’t terribly well-informed about what goes on overseas. They don’t know a whole lot about the part of the world we’ve been fighting wars in for the last decade. Correcting these failures could, in fact, be a good thing.

(Though one should always be careful not to assume that lack of knowledge is always and everywhere the result of censorship or stupidity. It might instead result simply from lack of interest. Not everyone wants to spend hours studying Egypt, and they may have very good reasons for feeling that way. We should be careful not to politicize what may be nothing more than matters of taste.)

But Rich goes rather off the rails with this antepenultimate paragraph:

Unable to watch Al Jazeera English, and ravenous for comprehensive and sophisticated 24/7 television coverage of the Middle East otherwise unavailable on television, millions of Americans last week tracked down the network’s Internet stream on their computers. Such was the work-around required by the censorship practiced by America’s corporate gatekeepers. You’d almost think these news-starved Americans were Iron Curtain citizens clandestinely trying to pull in the jammed Voice of America signal in the 1950s — or Egyptians desperately seeking Al Jazeera after Mubarak disrupted its signal last week.

It’s true that Al Jazeera isn’t on many American cable boxes. It’s also true that Al Jazeera provided better coverage of the Middle East situation than the American networks. But the “Iron Curtain?” Really? Millions of Americans–news hungry, nay, news ravenous Americans—were prevented from seeing Al Jazeera by “the censorship practiced by America’s corporate gatekeepers,” says Rich.

Except, you know, for that whole World Wide Web thing. Al Jazeera’s right there, in all its live and steaming glory, for anyone with a browser and an Internet connection. Which is to say pretty much everyone. So what has Rich teed off, what has him fuming, is that millions of Americans, starved for news, had to turn from the screen in their living room to the (slightly smaller) one in their den.

In Rich’s world, this act of surfing–which most of us spend more time doing anyway than we really ought to–is akin to “Iron Curtain citizens clandestinely trying to pull in the jammed Voice of America signal in the 1950s.” It’s indistinguishable from “Egyptians desperately seeking Al Jazeera after Mubarak disrupted its signal” In other words, the idea of having to (easily, legally, and with no threat of reprisal) switch from the cable box to the browser window is functionally equivalent to risking imprisonment at the hands of totalitarian state thugs.

Maybe Frank needs to just relax. And turn off his TV.

THE HOLE hitting stores in July

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At long last–and it is a very long last, I assure you–my first novel, The Hole, is edited, turned in to the publisher, and in the production pipeline. It’s with great pleasure that I can finally announce that Permuted Press has given it a release date: July 2011.

In July, you’ll be able to buy a much better, much revised version of The Hole, in bookstores, on Amazon, and on various ebook readers. This one has an updated ending that better explains the central mystery of the novel. It has a new setup that makes a great deal more sense than the original. And it lacks all those wild inconsistencies and inaccuracies that plagued the first, serialized draft. In short, the revised novel–again, coming in July from Permuted Press–is all around … awesomer.

What’s more, in the week since I turned it in, I finalized the new back cover text. Here it is.

The world as Elliot Bishop and Evajean Rhodes know it is gone. Destroyed. In just two weeks, a horrific plague raged across the planet—driving its victims insane before killing them.

The two survivors set out on an unimaginable journey, driven by a cryptic message from Evajean’s husband:  If anything terrible happens, you must get to Salt Lake City. But the pair soon discover they are not alone, and that the plague has done more than kill. The countryside between Virginia and Utah now crawls with victims who have been driven mad—violent lunatics fueled with definite yet unknown purpose.

To survive, Elliot and Evajean must fight for their lives—against the crazies, against sinister forces who would stop their quest, against long-ago hidden menaces—and uncover the deeply guarded secret of those driven mad and the plague that spawned them.  The secret of a destructive force unleashed on the world by one of America’s most powerful religious sects…

I’ll post more news as it happens, here and on Facebook. The next big step is work on the cover (no, that one up there at the top of the post is not the final), which I’m thrilled to see. More importantly, this means more new writing. The novel’s done. I can now get to fresh stuff.

If you want to stay up to date on all that, learn about new developments with The Hole, and be notified of my latest fiction, you can check here or, better yet, fan me on Facebook. Doing so’s just a couple of clicks and then you’ll instantly be in the know.

Did Jesus fulfill Biblical prophecies?

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According to columnist David Limbaugh, there are too many coincidences for the Bible to be mere fable. Specifically, he’s shocked how closely the story of Jesus as told in the New Testament matches the messianic prophecies in the Old Testament. “The specificity of some of the individual prophecies is powerfully probative,” he writes, “but the odds against so many of them being fulfilled in the person of Christ by coincidence are utterly breathtaking.”

Limbaugh isn’t thinking clearly. Explaining why, I wrote this letter to the Washington Examiner, which was published in the January 5 issue.

Alternative explanation for biblical prophecies

Re: “Too many coincidences for the Bible to be mere fable,” Dec. 29

David Limbaugh is convinced that the fact that the story told in the Gospels so well matches the prophecies of the Old Testament proves the truth of Christianity.

Limbaugh fails to consider the alternative explanation: that the story as told in those Gospels was written with prior prophecies in mind. The earliest Gospel according to Mark was written six decades after Jesus’ birth by an author already convinced of his messianic status and no doubt familiar with all “574 Old Testament verses containing messianic prophesies.” We ought not be surprised, then, that Mark tells his tale in such a way as to fulfill those prophesies.

Thus, in order for Limbaugh’s argument to work, he needs to assume that the story of Jesus as presented by Mark, Matthew, Luke and John is truth instead of legend. In other words, Limbaugh must assume the very conclusion he is arguing for.

Aaron Ross Powell
Alexandria

Limbaugh’s logic works like this: We can be sure the New Testament is true and that Jesus was the messiah because he fulfilled the prophecies of the Old Testament. How do we know he fulfilled those prophecies? Because it says so in the New Testament. Put even more simply, Limbaugh’s argument is that the New Testament is true because the New Testament is true.

What’s troubling about Limbaugh’s column is not the obvious logical fallacy. Those are common enough and often trip up even the best of us. No, what’s troubling is that the response I gave the in letter is just so obvious.

Limbaugh came up with what he took to be a slam-dunk argument. But he clearly didn’t take even a brief moment to ponder counter arguments. He didn’t put in the effort to respect his intellectual opponents.

I’m reminded of a passage from John Stewart Mill’s On Liberty. Discussing the need to do exactly what Limbaugh didn’t, Mill writes,

Ninety-nine in a hundred of what are called educated men are in this condition; even of those who can argue fluently for their opinions. Their conclusion may be true, but it might be false for anything they know: they have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them, and considered what such persons may have to say; and consequently they do not, in any proper sense of the word, know the doctrine which they themselves profess.

Can we be Moral without God?

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The following letter I wrote appeared in last Monday’s Washington Post.

Michael Gerson rejects the idea of godless morality ["A moralist in atheist's clothing," op-ed, Oct. 15]. “Of course we can be good without God, but why the hell bother?” he wrote. “If there are no moral lines except the ones we draw ourselves, why not draw and redraw them in places most favorable to our interests?”

That atheists do lead moral lives and act selflessly, as Mr. Gerson admitted in the case of Christopher Hitchens, proved the error of the point.

The critique was further undermined by the fact that many of the moral prescriptions of Scripture guide almost no one today, from condoning slavery (Ephesians 6:5) to the murder of unruly children (Deuteronomy 21:18-21). This indicates that we bring a preexisting moral sense to these teachings, accepting those that agree with it and rejecting those that don’t.

Without God, we’d simply allow this moral sense to guide our actions — as most of us, atheists and theists alike, already do.

The comments from readers on the Washington Post website ran overwhelmingly positive. One objection raised a few times, however, is worth exploring here in a little more detail. Here’s how one commentator put it:

So, morality is inate and inborn? Immorality must therefore be a genetic flaw. Too bad the societal standards of morality change, meaning that morality is not preexisting.

While I do believe that much of our moral sense is innate and, thus, biological in origin, this is not what I meant by “preexisting.” Rather, I intended only to express that this moral sense preexists any rules each of us gleans from the Bible. Whether our morality is biologically baked in or the result of cultural teachings, my point was simply that it does not come from scripture. If it did–if scripture were the only source of human morality–then we’d have no way to explain why the Bible’s more repugnant teachings, like those referenced in the letter above, are rejected by good people everywhere.

We critique the Bible with the moral sense we bring to it. Those commands it contains which agree with our moral sense, we embrace and then use the force of the Bible to strengthen. Those commands we find incompatible with our moral sense, we simply ignore. Either way, our morality comes prior to finding support for it in the Bible.

An Update on THE HOLE

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January 1st, 2011. That’s my due date for getting the revised manuscript turned in to Permuted Press. And I’m on track to do it. I tweaked Chapter 11 to satisfaction yesterday, leaving me with only four to go. After that, I have to head back to the middle for a little while to fix the vile little town of Nahom–which will be a good deal scarier in its new incarnation–then give the whole thing another read and polish, and I’m done. I hope. January 1st will tell.

So what’s changed between this revision, which could see print from Permuted as early as the latter half of 2011, and the serialized version still on the web? Quite a lot. The prose is better, for one, and lots of mistakes of action and timing have been addressed. But those are minor. The big stuff is, well, bigger.

(What follows is, I hope, spoiler free, but if you haven’t read the serial edition, you might want to skip the rest of this post. While it probably won’t ruin things for you, you’re not going to get much out of it, either.)

To start with, the Hole of the book’s title is, for much of the book, gone. Like no longer mentioned by Elliot and Evajean and no longer the intended goal of their cross-country journey. It shows up later, in dramatically different form, but, as originally written, the whole Hole thing wasn’t working. The new setup maintains a better sense of mystery and keeps the developing plot more coherent.

Then there’s Nahom. It’s being upgraded, spiking the creepiness factor and giving Elliot and Evajean good reason to want to get the hell out. This will be the last thing I do to the manuscript, as I intend to use it as an opportunity to pepper in references to what will happen later. Foreshadowing’s cool.

Finally, the conspiracy at the book’s core is deeper. More of it is explained. Upon turning the last page, you’ll know better what really happened and there shouldn’t be any major points of weirdness left dangling. Which isn’t to say I’ll answer everything. Typically, I like a little mystery left in what I read–and I have plans sketched for a long prequel short story or novella I’ll begin working on as soon as the novel is out of my hands, a prequel that’ll fill in even more of the backstory.

So that’s where things stand. January 1st looms. Back to work.