Positive Liberty

PhotoStamps.com is up and running once again. The site, which allows users to upload digital images and turn them into valid U.S. postage stamps, was initially closed after a number of people successfully ordered stamps depicting notorious criminals and corrupt political leaders. Yes, Warren Harding and Ulysses Grant have both gotten official U.S. stamps in the past, but Slobodan Milosevic is in a different league entirely. Ditto to Monica Lewinsky’s stained blue dress.

Ideally, the revamped site allows users to make valid U.S. postage stamps only from suitably decent photographs; the service now comes with a strict set of submission guidelines:

You agree not to use the PhotoStamps website or service:

A. To upload, order for print, or otherwise transmit or communicate any material for any unlawful purpose or that is obscene, offensive, blasphemous, pornographic, sexually suggestive, deceptive, threatening, menacing, abusive, harmful, an invasion of privacy, supportive of unlawful action, defamatory, libelous, vulgar, violent, or otherwise objectionable;

B. To upload, order for print, or otherwise transmit or communicate any material that depicts celebrities or celebrity likenesses, regional, national or international leaders or politicians, current or former world leaders, convicted criminals, or newsworthy, notorious or infamous images and individuals.

Restrictions like these only beg to be tested–and broken if possible. Would two men kissing be declared “obscene?” New Jersey Governor James McGreevey and his purported gay lover Golan Cipel were cited among the figures that caused the original uproar–but “love” has been a common theme for decades on our postage stamps, and an opposite-sex kiss would hardly be a first. Nor for that matter are gay people on postage stamps at all unheard of. If a straight wedding photo is okay, then what about mine?

And what about a picture of a marijuana plant with the words “Legalize Marijuana?” It doesn’t advocate anything illegal; it merely supports a specific political goal, and many different political views–some of them very controversial–have certainly been honored on U.S. postage stamps before.

Though I can’t find a link to it right now, the U.S. Post Office once considered airbrushing a Christmas stamp that depicted a painting of a nude baby Jesus. In the end they used the unretouched image, but I have to wonder just where the limits are to be drawn here. Suppose I were a sculptor or a photographer of serious artistic merit; could I place my work on stamps, even if it included some tasteful nudes?

My fear is that all of these would be categorized as “otherwise objectionable,” a policy which itself is objectionable.

Of course, I also have to wonder why we have such limits on the busuiness of carrying mail in general. Today it is a crime to carry first-class letters in a way that competes with the U.S. Postal Service, but for many years, dozens of private postal services operated quite successfully in the United States, a fact generally known only by stamp collectors and libertarians (I happen to be both). Local posts still periodically return when regular mail service is disrupted, and these demonstrate just how easy it would be to privatize the service we now have–as if FedEx weren’t proof enough. In other words, the natural monopoly isn’t.

(In that vein, the Shrub Oak Local Dog Post is one of those little things that makes me proud to be an American. Yes, such modern local posts are heavily regulated and do not genuinely compete with the monopoly, but you’ve got to admire them for trying.)

A reader has alerted me that a trailer is now available for the film Serenity, which is based on Joss Whedon’s brief but fantastic sci-fi television series Firefly. The film is projected to open in September.

The regular cast members have all returned, and from what I can tell, it seems that the biggest change is in the soundtrack: It’s metal, not country. I could take or leave either one, but if the plot, the ideas, and the execution are all as good as the original show, this is going to be the best movie of the year.

Paul Musgrave spots a gloriously funny Wikipedia entry on sociologist Pierre Bourdieu. It runs in part,

[Bourdieu] was also known as a politically interested and active leftist intellectual, supporting work against the influences of political elites and neoliberal capitalism. He was the left’s enemy of itself: the French Socialist party used to talk of la gauche bourdieusienne, their enemies on the left. It is difficult to think of an Anglo equivalent: perhaps a sober Christopher Hitchens…

To summarise Bourdieu’s theoretical and political stance and complexities: he would have applauded Wikipedia as empowering the average person in an attempt to recapture the definition of knowledge from the ruling classes, but he would have derided its neutral point of view policy as a fantasy of Anglo-American faux-liberals, who — by claiming a meta-stance above the rest of us — merely foist on us their own definition of power and reality.

Whatever merits Bourdieu may have elsewhere, right here it’s the old lazy-academic shell game once again: This knowledge isn’t real knowledge; real knowledge is no more and no less than that which we ourselves believe. I have to wonder how long this particular game will keep its charm; historians, at least when they are being candid, will recall Karl Marx having done the same, albeit several layers of faux-epistemology higher up.

And while we are speaking of candor, does it occur to anyone else that Christopher Hitchens has been grossly and unfairly maligned? The man writes one lousy essay in which he dares to state openly something that most of us truly believe, but that we allow ourselves to believe only in secret: On the whole, it is quite often more fun to be drunk than to be sober. And sometimes–the nerve of him–he’s even practiced what he preaches. For this he is accused of vice, and if irony were an intoxicant, I would be drunk indeed right now.

If you’re like me, whenever you see the headline above, you begin to salivate. Not for the tempting taste of plump Irish babies, mind you, but for a good old parody in the style of Jonathan Swift. Jennifer Gordon of Purdue University has written a new twist on what could be the longest-running meme in the anglophone commentariat. Here is her modest proposal:

Homosexuality is a contagious malady which adversely affects our economy and endangers Americans souls.

The homosexual population in the United States drains our economy. The government requires companies to provide insurance for domestic partners and their children which forces prices to rise, which harms every American consumer.

Homosexuality also affects the souls of the ten percent of Americans who have fallen victim to the plague. The Bible clearly states that any man who lays with another man should be put to death and end up in Hell.

I have objectively examined the homosexual plague and have created a modest proposal to eradicate the epidemic.

Extraordinary members of police agencies will be employed to gather homosexuals for redistribution in “degayification” camps. These camps will provide the homosexuals with the proper tools to alleviate their symptoms.

Read the whole thing at The Exponent Online, Purdue University’s student paper.

In all cases, the logic of the modest proposal is simple: We must either have the courage of our convictions–fully and frankly–or else admit that somewhere within them, there lurks a very ugly sentiment. The “modest proposal” lays it all on the table and does wonders to clarify our thinking. Thanks, Jennifer. You’re awesome.

And if you read French, you can also visit this page. In the comments, a group of non-anglophones simply didn’t get the joke. More troublingly, they refused to get it, even when the connection to Swift was explained to them (comments on this blog show the most recent first; Swift was pointed out quite early in the discussion, and pretty much everyone dismissed the similarity). These people proceeded to call Ms. Gordon a Nazi in a hundred different ways. And she’s a Nazi who is perfectly typical of America, because we’re all Nazis here: “Clearly, many French do not understand that that’s how the United States really is, that this girl is by no means unusual, and that she represents what the majority of Americans think right now,” wrote one commenter.

Shame on them. Shame on them for not knowing Swift, perhaps the one English author that everyone should read–and shame on them for dismissing the obvious fact that this essay was a parody. They find it more comforting, I suppose, to have Americans that they can hate. And they say that we’re the Nazis.

In English, a “modest proposal” is always a parody. Shame on them for thinking otherwise–and for thinking so badly of Americans besides.

In the comments, I did my best to challenge these anti-American stereotypes and to set the record, um, straight. (And yes, I know about the accent marks. I wasn’t near my French-language computer when I typed it.) We’ll see what happens. I hope that I too am not mistaken for a Nazi. I’m openly gay, I love both the United States and France, and I just wish they would get along a little better.

Update: Be sure to see the comments below, all of which are written in English. I think that we are all learning something from the exchange.

I had no idea how much Baptists like to party:

My source informs me that the photo was taken in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, whose Baptists seem to have been quite well-prepared for 4/20.

Wow. For the last few days my server stats reached all-time highs.

The reason? I seem to be one of the few bloggers talking about Saint Malachy’s alleged papal prophecies, a topic I have covered here, here, and here. As a historian, it’s nice to feel useful.

It is said that Malachy, an 12th-century Irish saint, wrote a short description of all the popes from his own day up to the Apocalypse (here is most of it in English and Latin). Intriguingly, even the Catholic Church has issued favorable statements about Malachy’s prophecy, despite its apparent prediction that the world will end during the reign of the pope following Benedict XVI.

But Malachy almost certainly did not write the prophecies that bear his name; scholarly opinion has it that they originated in the late sixteenth century. It’s important to keep this in mind as we continue: Would God really choose to speak through a forgery that essentially lies to the reader?

Worse, the last two lines–forecasting an imminent Apocalypse–seem to have been added in the nineteenth century, a forgery upon a forgery. Thus the tagline “Gloria olivae,” that of “Petrus Romanus,” his successor, and the prediction of the Apocalypse, had nothing to do with the original prophecy. Would God really choose to speak by appending one forged document to another?

Now, the nineteenth century was an awfully convenient time to tack on a few lines about the end of the world. In 1820, when it now seems that the new material was composed, there were but sixteen popes forecast until the end of the world, a useful number indeed: It was near enough to enchant the faithful, but far enough that no one then living would be called to account for a failure.

So it is with all well-written prophecies, for the art of prophecy means never having to say you’re sorry. It means carefully hedging your bets and speaking so cryptically that, with a large flock of eager faithful trailing afterward, a confirmation of some sort can never be far behind.

The direct hits in a prophecy, or at least those aspects of it that seem to ring the truest, get exaggerated all out of proportion. Those elements that have no particular relevance are ignored, or perhaps put off until the future, in which time they will… eventually… be fulfilled. But in the fullness of time, don’t all things eventually happen, kind of?

This combination of selective reading and constant deferral of unfulfilled prophecies offers the appropriately vague prophetic statement an oracular quality that does much to fool the gullible. While Malachy’s prophecies can’t be deferred indefinitely, for we are led to believe that they are an ordered sequence, what they lack in temporal flexibility they more than recoup in vagueness.

For example, some are now claiming that Joseph Ratzinger’s papal name–Benedict XVI–is a fulfillment of pseudo-Malachy’s prophecy. Recall that its prediction for the current pope is merely the laconic “Gloria olivae.” The credulous are now pointing out that the Benedictine Order has sometimes been known as the Olivetians, and thus the connection is made.

I hate to rain on everyone’s pre-apocalyptic parade, but… You guys are nuts. And you’re making your faith look ridiculous. Stop it. Now. (Or don’t stop it. You know perfectly well that a skeptic like me only needs a big bucket of popcorn to make the whole affair more entertaining than a night at the movies. So carry on as long as you like, please…)

But as I was saying, Ratzinger was never a Benedictine. Nor was the original pope Benedict a Benedictine. Nor were any of the Benedicts Benedictines (and most of the early Benedicts aren’t anything to rejoice over, either). Finally, Saint Benedict, the founder of the order, never was a pope.

“Benedict” is a name, a very old and rather common name through much of the Church’s history. Seeing a coincidence here is rather like finding mystical import in the fact that our first president’s name was George — and, hey wow, so it is with our current president.

The whole “Benedict/Benedictine” thing may seem an arresting coincidence, but if pseudo-Malachy continues to guess correctly, the next pope will of course be Peter the Roman, whose reign will witness the Last Judgment. Pseudo-Malachy says so explicitly, at least in his 1820 incarnation.

We gather that the Last Judgment will be rather hard to overlook, that coincidences or mistaken identities will be unlikely, and that attempts at deception will be exceedingly difficult, what with corpses rising from their graves, Jesus Christ returning in glory, and each of us departing for an eternity in Heaven or Hell.

You can’t fudge stuff like that, which means that pseudo-Malachy’s next prediction is at long last subject to falsification, the scientific process whereby bunkum is eliminated. Prophecies fare poorly in the hard realm of empiricism, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the Catholic Church–which tolerates pseudo-Malachy only so long as he keeps the faithful believing–has conveniently disavowed the coming Apocalypse:

It has been noticed concerning Petrus Romanus, who according to St. Malachy’s list is to be the last pope, that the prophecy does not say that no popes will intervene between him and his predecessor designated Gloria olivae. It merely says that he is to be the last, so that we may suppose as many popes as we please before “Peter the Roman.”

It’s a nice, cautious step, but it also means we must exempt pseudo-Malachy from any empirical test–indefinitely. It’s also an interpretive approach that is nowhere justified by the text of the prophecy.

Nonetheless, this is in keeping with a longstanding tradition in the Catholic Church, which forbids official pronouncements on the date of the Apocalypse. By doing so, they avoid the repeated embarrassment suffered by the Jehovah’s Witnesses during the twentieth century; their faith saw no fewer than eight predicted dates for the Apocalypse both come and go in the space of a few decades. Incredibly, their membership has increased despite these disconfirmations. Or perhaps because of them.

For further reading on prophecies, I recommend this page from the University of Virginia’s New Religious Movements Project. But enough of the future for me; I’m returning to the past. I’ve got a dissertation to write, and I do hope it will be done before the Apocalypse.

Wesley Stace loves words. His love animates every page of Misfortune, a debut novel that teems with colorful language, a bright peacock of a book. Nor are his words always the ten-dollar variety; his attention even to simple things shows him to be a master of the craft. One character hangs about the hallways “like a fine mist.” Another imposes a regime of austerities; the sauce makers of the manor are “reduced.” It’s not the stuff of belly laughter–well, a couple of times it was–but the sunniness of it all does grow contagious.

Better known as singer/songwriter John Wesley Harding, Wesley Stace puts his words to the service of an ambitious plot: In 1820s England, Lord Geoffroy Loveall, the richest man in the kingdom, discovers a foundling boy. Loveall is eccentric in fine old British style and still grieving the loss of his sister in early childhood. He raises the foundling as a girl instead, covering his legal tracks the best he can.

Loveall names the child Rose; he, now a she, grows up in a mansion so perfectly typical of all our Victorian imaginations that it could only be a carefully-wrought fiction. I would love to see Tim Burton direct the film version of Misfortune. Few other directors would appreciate the crystalline, just-so-perfect romance of it all.

Intellectually, Misfortune is an extended think-piece on gender and essence, a topic that western culture never tires of discussing. We never tire of it, no matter how much gender may change over the ages, and no matter how much it may belie our hopes of pinning down anything essential about it: a fine mist indeed.

So do the clothes make the woman? Or will what’s inside always show through in the end? What really is inside, anyway, and how does it get there? Rose’s adopted mother hopes that she will achieve some elusive blending of male and female, finally transcending the old gender order and helping to create something new. Is it all a utopian dream? And even if it is–well, what might we learn from it anyway?

Though it is set in Victorian England, and though Stace makes a nod toward Dickens (and Ovid) at every available opportunity, Misfortune is a thoroughly 21st-century novel. A tad self-consciously, it discusses authorial voice, historical certainty, and gendered politics, often in terms that the Victorians could never have conceived. Stace knows this, and he pulls off the multiple layers of writing and meaning as gracefully as anyone could have hoped. The result is a postmodern reflection of a Victorian novel, with one key difference: Postmodernism rarely has this much style. Or coherence. Or unfeigned confidence.

The light prose, the absence of dogmatism or bitterness, the pure fun of the work, all set it apart from those academic gender theorists who seem to view their work as akin to performing an autopsy on a hostile alien creature. Stace is cryptic about what’s really essential to gender; he teases more than he analyzes. If anything, his clearest message is to view the whole phenomenon with a generous measure of humility and good cheer–enduring values that even the Victorians might have grasped.

The story’s antagonists are the Osberns, that inevitable branch of the family that did poorly with its share of the ancestral fortune and now wants to cash in on the Loveall branch’s increasingly manifest oddities. A heavier hand might have made the Osberns little more than stand-ins for today’s gender bigots, but they are not. Detestable they may be, but they are fully understandable in their own twisted terms.

Nor is Anonyma, Rose’s adoptive mother, a perfect stand-in for the radical anti-essentialist position in today’s gender wars. The echoes are everywhere in Misfortune, but they don’t overpower the story itself. If Anonyma’s hopes toward a genderless utopia are frustrated in the end, the result is neither a clear failure nor a full indictment of her ambition.

Her daughter Rose Loveall ends up neither a man trapped in a woman’s gender role, nor precisely a woman with a mistakenly male anatomy. Unique in all the world, she is a character painted on the canvas of gender, distinctive where most of us are ordinary. Were she real, and alive today, she would be the idol of drag queens everywhere.

The life she lives is neither utopian nor a total disaster, though her difficulties are many, and one could easily see a less fictional individual in her situation meeting with a far more painful fate. Still we are left to wonder just what we might learn if we too were to take her journey, and Misfortune’s overall effect is to place a good solid question mark after all our certainties of gender.

This brings me to the novel’s conclusion, which I have to admit frustrated me somewhat. The resolution felt a little contrived, and I predicted a good deal of it in advance. Still, the letdown was almost worth it, even if only for the climactic scene, one that Stace set up with chessboard precision.

Lastly, a fictional appendix to the novel implicitly nettled both public and scholarly history in a way that struck me as rather unfair, but then, I know I can at times be overly sensitive on these matters. The rest of the novel more than compensated, and would that all fiction had only these minor faults.

Reviewer’s note: I received an advance copy of Misfortune for review at Positive Liberty. Advance copies are always welcome, though I cannot guarantee either a favorable review or even a full reading if I happen to dislike the book. This is, after all, just a hobby. Do contact me with your suggestions, though, and perhaps we can work something out.

CNN is reporting that German Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger has been chosen as pope.

Here is some news analysis from a historian: Papal names often reflect the policies the incoming pope hopes to pursue. In this case, the two most recent Benedicts–XV and XIV–suggest quite a lot about how Ratzinger views his mission.

Benedict XV’s tenure came during World War I, a time of general crisis in the West. From the perspective of a hard-line conservative, today probably looks like a similar time of crisis, if not physically than certainly in spiritual matters.

Benedict XIV was pope during the years 1740-58, an era that happens to be in my specialty. Benedict XIV definitively condemned a number of theological innovations, particularly by the Jesuits, who then as now included many of the most liberal theologians in the Church. The following comes from Wikipedia, which seems to be more or less accurate:

Perhaps the most important act of his pontificate was the promulgation of his famous laws about missions in the two bulls, Ex quo singulari and Omnium solicitudinum. In these bulls he denounced the custom of accommodating Christian words and usages to express non-Christian ideas and practices of the native cultures, which had been extensively done by the Jesuits in their Indian and Chinese missions. An example of this is the statues of the ancestors - is honor paid to the ancestors to be considered unacceptable ‘ancestor worship,’ or is it something more like the Catholic veneration of the saints? And can a Catholic legitimately ‘venerate’ an ancestor known to not have been a Christian? The choice of a Chinese translation for the name of God had also been debated since the early 1600s.

The consequence of these bulls was that many of these converts left the church.

Historians continue to debate just what was going on at these Jesuit missions, and the matter is too complex to delve into at length right now. A charitable interpretation would have the Jesuits appreciating the philosophy of Confucius just as Catholics now appreciate the philosophies of Aristotle or Plato. A less charitable approach has them turning to outright paganism, which I frankly find hard to believe.

But whatever interpretation we follow for these centuries-old disputes, it certainly seems that Ratzinger intends to govern as a conservative, and to brave the consequences of his choice. As a non-Catholic, I really have no strongly-held position on this. Still, I do wish my Catholic friends, many of whom are gay, the best in whatever may be to come.

Yes, I have to admit I am a bit concerned. Consider this Freeper who linked to my previous article on papal prophecies. Apparently he didn’t notice that I am rather a skeptic about the coming Apocalypse:

The Order of St. Benedict claims this final pope will come within the Benedictine Order [sic], and that he was placed in the secession [sic] line because St. Benedict himself prophesied that before the end of the world, his Order will triumphantly lead the Catholic Church in its battle against evil (the Battle of Armageddon).”

…Pope Benedict, the 112th pope since Celestine II. As prophesized, the connection to the Olivetans, even if only in the name chosen. [sic]

Gird thy loins, it’s evil-smitin’ time!

Cruelty doesn’t need a reason; it only needs an excuse.

Update: Other blogs discussing the historical Benedicts include Majikthise, whose speculations are a lot like mine; Outside the Tent, who draws unsavory (but, I think, unjustified) conclusions from Benedict XIV’s anti-Semitism, and lastly a whole lot of bloggers who don’t know their Roman numerals very well. No links for them.

Adam Tierney of In the Agora has a fascinating post today on how to reconcile modern science with a belief in the soul. I’d like to discuss his observations point-by-point. Though this will involve a lot of quote-and-response writing, I don’t at all consider this a “fisking.” It’s not like anyone is an authority about the nature of consciousness just yet, and I would be willing to bet that many of our present-day answers will look perfectly childish just a few decades from now, so long as science keeps advancing. Remember behaviorism? That’s us, forty years on.

With that said, Adam’s first substantive point runs,

the most reasonable way to define the boundaries of human life is by using the condition of the brain as a reference point. One is human inasmuch as one has a functioning human brain.

Already something interesting is afoot: The definition we use today is very different from those of other cultures and eras. The Romans believed that the soul and the breath were closely aligned or even identified with one another. Hence the modern word spirit, which comes from the Latin word for breath. In the ancient world, breath and life were often thought to be the same, and when the breath departed, the soul too was held to be gone.

Other cultures associated the spirit with blood; notable among these were the Israelites, who sealed covenants and offered sacrifices in blood, for these represented the bond of life that all participated in. This is why the blood is to be removed from meat that is eaten under Jewish dietary law: Blood is strongly associated with the uncanny spiritual essence of the creature.

In our culture, the brain is the seat of the soul, and we likewise find eating brains repulsive. Yes, many European cultures eat brains as a delicacy, but these are throwbacks to the time before the modern-day yuck factor set in. (Incidentally, it would be fascinating to write a paper on this sometime. When exactly did we learn the horror of eating brains, and what does it tell us about our ideas of the soul?)

My guess–with no research right now to back it up–is that the taboo against brains arose at some point around the seventeenth century, to coincide with Descartes’ ideas about matter, soul, and brain: Descartes held that the soul was eternal, and that it influenced the mere matter of the physical body through the pineal gland, a tiny structure within the brain. Tierney continues, quite intelligently,

[The idea that the brain is the seat of the soul] is not intrinsically opposed to belief in the soul; in fact, for the remainder of this post I’m going to assume that the soul exists, some sort of extra-dimensional ghostly substance that contains your essence, and which will live on after your death. Nevertheless, even given the existence of this mysterious non-matter, we need to account for the fact that damage to the brain can cause the erasure of particular cognitive functions; for example, patients with damage to particular parts of the visual areas of the brain are rendered unable to detect movement, or see colors. The only even remotely philosophically satisfying way to account for this is to suggest, as Descartes did, that the soul communicates with the brain somehow, and that any functions lost as one’s brain is destroyed will be restored to you when you move on to your next station in life, or meta-life.

Interestingly, though Tierney writes that, “we need to account for the fact that damage to the brain can cause erasure of particular cognitive functions,” he never does so. I would submit that this is because he cannot, and that no one really can. Hard as it is to say, those functions are gone, and with them, a part of the self has disappeared.

As a nonbeliever, I find that the gradual erasure of cognitive, emotional, and sensory functions is absolutely the strongest argument against the permanence of the soul. If the soul is our cognitive or emotive faculty, then the soul is self-evidently mortal.

If the soul is something other than these faculties, then I have yet to see a proof or even evidence of its permanence. Is the soul identical with (or composed in part from) our ethical faculty? But even this is subject to decay in many people. To my mind, the soul is identical with the mortal physical body, and, in the final analysis, “soul” is simply a word we use for certain aspects of these still-mortal beings called humans.

The most robust concept of the soul that I can imagine, one that might also be eternal, is the Platonic: Our soul is the part of us that represents the best within us. It is the part of us that fully realizes its goals, and whose goals are perfectly good. It is every right answer or right action that we have ever thought or done.

A curious property of this idea of the soul is that it seems we only sometimes manage to live as ensouled creatures: Other times we are foolish, wicked, or just plain wrong. We are in touch with our souls or far from them; we are acting according to their dictates, or we are straying from them. The soul is something we live up to–or not.

A further curious property of this idea of the soul is that it is by no necessity eternal: Right actions and ideas do not seem to endure any more than than wrong ones; both have their aftereffects and pass away in more or less the same manner.

A final curiosity is that the idea of the soul as “the best within us” means that the soul need not be contiguous with the body: The best may dwell within us at times, but it also leaves us and moves on to greener pastures as soon as necessity demands.

Crucially, these difficulties mean that the soul I describe cannot be the Christian one. It makes no sense to Judge a soul that is always perfectly good, nor to assign personal praise or blame to a soul that is only imperfectly identified with the self. If this is the soul, the soul is not Christian.

Have I, in seeking to find the soul, found only the God of the deists? Perhaps. But then where does the eternal soul enter into the picture, if at all? I confess that I still do not see anything eternal about man. Tierney does, however, and this sets for him a formidable problem. He writes,

There is no obvious point in the development of the fetus when the brain makes a quantum leap from mere automaton to functioning human; instead, the neural connections are gradually extended and pruned as the brain grows. I have no satisfactory answer to this question, and as a result I’m simply going to say that at some point, between when the fetus has no brain (up to about 21 days) and when the fetus is fully developed, the soul somehow makes contact with the organism and it becomes a person.

I find this answer unsatisfying, probably far more unsatisfying than Tierney does. I think the question he poses is itself misleading, and I am going to propose a few analogies to show why I think it hurts more than it helps.

Suppose instead of asking about the soul, I asked at what point a human being develops fluency in a language. Clearly, some people are fluent in English; others are fluent in French, and I–essentially fluent in both–can distinguish these people with even a few minutes of conversation: It’s a key indicator that I too am fluent in both languages. Yet on what day did I gain this fluency? I could not tell you, nor could anyone else.

The question itself is preposterous, as are many other questions in human development: When did I become right-handed? On what day and at what time did I learn to read? When was the moment that I had to begin daily shaving, for fear of looking unkempt?

These questions all ask us to be precise about processes whose nature is fundamentally gradual. So too is the nature of the soul: I find that it is both built and destroyed gradually.

True to our Christian heritage, the entire vocabulary of the soul in the West is predicated on its timelessness. Yet the evidence against this timelessness seems overwhelming, and I can find no evidence for it at all.

I’ve watched kids grow up. They develop little by little, and while I would not suggest that infants are less worthy human beings than fully-grown adults, still, it’s clear that some sort of change takes place, and the change comes to all aspects of the organism that we can measure or describe. The soul is included in the package; it takes on new ideas, new moral judgments, new joys and sorrows as it develops. There is no indication that these things existed from the beginning, nor that anything of the soul existed before the conception of the individual. Even just after conception, the soul does not seem present yet, and Tierney concurs with this. The difference is that where he wonders at what point the soul develops, I hold that it develops through imperceptible degrees from the mere stuff of matter.

Hey, any explanation of the soul is going to look ridiculous at some point. All other things being equal, you’d might as well have an explanation that conforms to the facts you have observed.

Painfully, I have also watched elderly people decline. I’ve seen how people, often who are very close to me, gradually become less and less of what they were. The memories disappear; they recognize fewer aspects of their surroundings; their capacities diminish.

No, I don’t like it–of course not. I would love more than anything else to see evidence that some part within them continued, that it was eternal, and that one day I might reunite with it. Nothing would make me happier, I assure you.

The soul waxes and wanes, like the sunrise and the sunset–It’s either that, or the word “soul” refers to no observable properties at all. And what is a thing that has no properties, if not merely an idle wish?

Does this view of the soul make me a monster? I don’t support Peter Singer’s ideas about infanticide, for one thing. If we love the daylight, it is monstrous to blot out the sunrise–and likewise the sunset. I start having qualms about abortion when the brain exists, and I can’t think of abortion as moral after the point of viability, except to save the life of the mother. Sometimes, the sunrise cannot yet be called the day, hard as that may be. Sometimes again, we must choose between one light and another, and this is a still harder choice.

I don’t know that my view of the gradual development of the soul will ever become widespread, in part because it calls us to make so many hard choices and fine distinctions. And those choices will not always be the same for everyone. It’s messy, but it’s what I see in the evidence before me.

Still, I think my own view coincides at many points with Tierney’s, at least in matters of policy. He writes,

if you agree with the argument that I just laid out, logic dictates that biomedical cloning should be unobjectionable. The subject of cloning is fraught with misunderstandings, and as a result I’m going to lay out a few basic facts before I proceed. There are two main types of cloning, reproductive and biomedical. During reproductive cloning, an egg is first removed from a woman. The nucleus is then taken out of the egg, and a somatic cell is placed into the enucleated egg. The egg grows into a blastocyst; this blastocyst is implanted into a woman, and it eventually grows into a full-fledged human being. During biomedical cloning, the egg is enucleated, a somatic cell is placed inside the egg, and a blastocyst develops, but the blastocyst is discarded before it can mature any further, after it has been harvested for stem cells.

I agree entirely. Even if the soul of the individual develops gradually, still, the very fact that therapeutic cloning is possible indicates something very important: If the “new soul” being gradually created can still be incorporated into another soul, then clearly the process has not progressed very far, and therapeutic cloning is unobjectionable.

I part company, though, on the question of reproductive cloning. Tierney writes,

Reproductive cloning is clearly objectionable. Not only do the products of reproductive cloning face health risks such as premature aging and other problems, but they are also, well, “products.” Some basic instinct tells us that human beings should be born, not made, and as such nearly everyone finds this variety of cloning morally repugnant.

There is no doubt that the health risks of reproductive cloning make the procedure ethically wrong. But I find it a misplaced fear to think that humans will be reduced to “products” if we ever overcome the substantial hurdles to reproductive cloning.

Recall that many people opposed in vitro fertilization on precisely these same grounds. Today, there is virtually no stigma against those who were “products” of reproductive technology. They are humans just like anyone else, even if they did begin in a lab. It is not our origin that matters, but what we eventually become.

Cloned or not, all humans will be unique. I’ve written about this issue in the past, and I’m going to quote myself at length:

I consider the soul a kind of continuous relationship among the parts of the body–a melody, if you will. When the body dies, the melody ends, for the instrument on which it was played has ceased to exist.

The instrument of the body is far more than the individual’s genetic code: All of us are conditioned–tuned, as it were–by our life experiences. Each tuning is always unique, and each melody is both irreplaceable and completely unlike any other. My own unique body is the only instrument that could ever hope to play the melody of my soul. No other body even has a chance.

As another example, a good stout pair of leather gloves is all that you need for cloning a raspberry bush. You simply pull up the plant’s runners and put them down somewhere else. Treat them well, and in late summer the new plants grow an abundant crop of fresh, sweet, juicy raspberries. Every raspberry is unique and wonderful; each one has is its own telos, its own magnificent stab at perfection. Never would I ask myself whether the raspberries I ate with breakfast this morning were somehow less than fully real, or whether, in some mystical sense, I had only managed to consume one of them.

And for me at least, humans are made of exactly the same stuff as raspberries.

I highly recommend to you the original post; I consider it one of my best.

No matter where or how they originate, humans will be endowed with the same dignity, the same spiritual qualities, and the same intrinsic worth. Those who fret that clones will be less human than others only confess their own baser impulses–I strongly suspect that some part of them longs to dehumanize the clones before they even exist. I find this clonophobia, this eagerness to dehumanize the human, to be just as repugnant as any other prejudice I can imagine. No, in a sense it’s worse, because a clone will likely come from an individual whom the clonophobic person already holds to be fully human.

Dehumanizing an identical copy of someone that we find fully human is deeply problematic, whether or not this feeling comes to us instinctively, as Tierney urges. (I, for one, feel no such instinct.) If basic instinct told us to dehumanize anyone that resembled another person too closely–then what of identical twins? Only a few cultures have ever held them in horror, and the practice of infanticide against twins is one that few multiculturalists would dare to defend.

I’d like to propose a new principle instead: Why not err on the side of acceptance into the great human family?

By any reasonable measure, I’m not on a blogging hiatus anymore.

Seemed silly to keep denying it.

Libertarians are bristling at Jeffrey Rosen’s latest piece in the New York Times Magazine. It purports to uncover the secretive “Constitution in Exile” movement; said movement supposedly favors rolling back much of the jurisprudence sustaining the New Deal and subsequent economic regulations. See for instance Tom Palmer, as well as David Bernstein of The Volokh conspiracy, writing on the doubtful existence of an organized movement and the equally doubtful legal history Rosen gives in his article. To summarize, while many legal thinkers do believe that a lot of the New Deal jurisprudence was wrongly decided, they disagree quite strongly among themselves about how to undo it. There is no shadowy conspiracy, just a lot of people talking openly about public policy and arguing it before the Supreme Court. Last I’d checked, there was nothing sinister about any of this.

How bad is the article? Well, we could grumble that contrary to Rosen’s implications, Democrats, not Republicans, actually appointed many of the pre-New Deal “conservative” judges. We could quibble over trivialities–for instance, that many economic regulations were continually sustained even before the New Deal. Or we could howl in outrage as Cass Sunstein describes himself as a “moderate,” and as that description gets to print with no qualification at all. (Hey, can I be a moderate, too?) Lastly, we could recoil in horror at some of the most frightening pictures of law professors ever to be printed. Really. And can you guess which side of the issue they take?

But my personal favorite outrage from this article came near the end, where Rosen links deregulation to the recent wave of financial scandals–never once asking whether some things (like lying to your customers) might still remain rightfully illegal. Obviously they should, so much so that the suggestion is little more than a smear.

So yes, grumble. And then, to cheer yourself up, read this piece from the New York Times by Bruce Bawer. Granted, it doesn’t quite balance the scales, but it’s a good start:

The received wisdom about economic life in the Nordic countries is easily summed up: people here are incomparably affluent, with all their needs met by an efficient welfare state. They believe it themselves. Yet the reality - as this Oslo-dwelling American can attest, and as some recent studies confirm - is not quite what it appears.

The article goes on to describe life in Norway, a country that prides itself on being the world’s richest despite strong evidence to the contrary. Basic services are quite often much worse than those in the United States, taxation is out of control, and “Every weekend, armies of Norwegians drive to Sweden to stock up at supermarkets that are a bargain only by Norwegian standards.” Only by Norwegian standards–because the most socialized countries are also the ones with the most inefficient economies and the least amount of purchasing power in the hands of the citizens.

In late March, another study, this one from KPMG, the international accounting and consulting firm… indicated that when disposable income was adjusted for cost of living, Scandinavians were the poorest people in Western Europe. Danes had the lowest adjusted income, Norwegians the second lowest, Swedes the third. Spain and Portugal, with two of Europe’s least regulated economies, led the list.

The gap between the United States and Europe is even greater, of course, and it continues to grow. Nor is the United States merely a better place for the super-rich, as some liberals like to argue; all across the income scale, America is doing a better job of providing basic goods and services. In Norway, “even the humblest of meals - a large pizza delivered from Oslo’s most popular pizza joint - will run from $34 to $48, including delivery fee and a 25 percent value added tax.”

Clearly we’re doing something right.

Several commenters have replied to my challenge below, which can be put as follows:

Antibiotics stay useful only so long as they are not overused or stopped too early. Either one brings the spread of resistant bacteria. In a libertarian property rights regime, where drugs were in principle freely available to any who wanted them, what, if anything, would prevent the quick overuse of antibiotics, meaning a loss to both the drug companies who develop them and the consumers who want to take them when they are genuinely sick?

It’s reasonable to wonder why I’m even asking in the first place, given how far we are from a true libertarian polity. As one commenter remarked,

Well, if we could make everything except antibiotics (and other drugs with antibiotic-like externality properties) available to all consenting adults without prescriptions, that’d be pretty damn close to Libertopia, and definitely closer than I expect to get in my lifetime.

That’s the thing about practical libertarianism in our time: it’s just not worth worrying about the small, hard cases when there are so many non-hard cases to work on first.

I almost agree, but shirking the hard cases always seems to bite us in the butt, and frankly I’m tired of it. The usual (and wrongheaded) anti-libertarian line runs like this: “Libertarians would privatize things that shouldn’t be private, like roads, money, and prescription drugs. That’s what’s wrong with them, and that’s why we shouldn’t listen to their other arguments, either.”

Until we do a better job giving plausible answers to public-goods problems, libertarians will continue to look like dogmatists at best and dangerous cranks at worst. Forget the merits of our viewpoint; even thoughtful critiques like this one will be ignored:

[O]ne of the reasons that antibiotic development is slow is because of the Byzantine FDA approval process. Or do the folks who are sick or dead because of that just not count?

Of course! But so long as we brush off the real problems of forging a laissez-faire system, we can forget about reshaping the system we have. And what do I mean by brushing off? Jonathan Dresner puts it pretty well:

Wouldn’t the hard-core free-market libertarians argue that the decline in effectiveness of antibiotics produced by idiots in a truly free society would produce market pressures which would result in development of superior and effective products. And that the artificially maintained patent protections and prescription regime of our current system have perpetuated an antibiotics regime that clearly is past it’s peak?

They would. But it’s just this sort of hand-waving counterfactual to which libertarians are prone when they become lazy: “In a better regime, things that we can’t even imagine would make everything work out fine…” Perhaps, but isn’t it a bit early to assume such a thing?

[As a side note, we should also criticize one of the premises on which our inquiry is based: In libertarian theory, the drug companies who created these products in the first place are the only ones who ought to regulate their distribution. Consumers don't have an inherent "right" to buy anything--except insofar as the corporation decides voluntarily to sell it. This is an important criticism of the naive-libertarian view that "I should have a right to buy whatever I damn well please." No, you don't. But see below; I suspect there still is a solution that will leave everyone happy, and that actually depends in a sense on the drug companies' right to refuse.]

Ultimately, I suspect that the root of the problelm lies elsewhere, possibly in how we think of the good that’s being traded. I have a hunch that a lot of public goods problems would vanish if we only framed them better, and that antibiotics are a prime example.

Consider how free-market thinkers have made a stunningly important contribution to present-day political thought by framing environmental pollution as a commodity that can be traded on the open market. Earlier theorists never even imagined it, but virtually everyone takes this for granted today. Even better, it’s actually reduced pollution. Perhaps a similar but much more modest reframing might help here, too.

The first step again comes from one of Dresner’s comments. Why he’s not on our team is slightly beyond me by now:

It’s easy to find a better answer: you already know what a good policy would look like. I think what you’re looking for is principles that justify it within the context of libertarianism, and I’m honestly not sure they exist.

Creaky as it is, today’s system works, more or less. Surely it could be better, but just as surely, it could also be a whole lot worse. Might it be that the prescription drug regime really does protect a legitimate property interest–albeit one that does not seem legitimate to us at the moment?

It’s hard to deny that dispensing antibiotics to everyone without a prescription would do harm to those consumers who would wish to buy and use the drugs responsibly in the future. Effective future antibiotics that have not been overused are thus a desired item of limited availability. In other words they are a commodity–a “negative commodity” to be exact–and thus there should be a market for them.

There should be a market not merely in the sense that so much of a certain white powder trades for so many pieces of greenish paper. I gain value, and a value of limited availability, just by knowing that effective antibiotics will exist if I need them. And here is the key: I gain this value even if I do not use the drugs.

Now I should be able to pay for this commodity just like any other, and at some point a drug company should to be happy–thrilled, even–to take my money, and in exchange to refrain from the overdistribution of antibiotics. Remember, refraining from production is a whole lot cheaper than producing, so wise-stewardship policies ought to be far cheaper than even the drugs themselves, which we would buy at the time of illness just as we do right now.

At last it turns out that there really is a market here, one that aims to connect consumers to drug companies in a particular fashion. It’s just not in the fashion that anyone imagined. Rather than buying a physical item, I am hoping to buy the wise stewardship of antibiotics.

So how can we set up an effective market for this service? Like the pollution markets, the rise and fall in the wise stewardship market would reflect the rise and fall of the industry it circumscribes. But in principle this ought not to be a problem.

My first try is to say that a property right should cover the use and distribution of antibiotics such that those who have not bought into the plan will get no antibiotics at all. Those who have bought in will agree to get antibiotics only when a third party certifies that they really are ill.

Our current system actually approximates what ought to be done. Drug companies research and develop the drugs; a third party (the government) sells off shares in a responsible-use association (or gives the service away for free), while also serving as a clearinghouse for drug purity and efficacy.

Could the system be privatized, given the assumption that wise stewardship is a negative commodity?

I would hypothesize that patients, who have a strong incentive to get well, and drug companies, who would now have a strong incentive to maximize profits both in the chemical market and in the wise-stewardship market, would quickly find ways to verify sicknesses in a way that balanced these interests. This is only a hypothesis, and a somewhat wild one at that, but it does seem a more reasonable than assuming that idiots and hypochondriacs will spur the market to create idiot-proof drugs that we cannot yet imagine. For one thing, my hypothesis has the virtue of working only with what we already have–and of conserving it rather than wasting it.

This verification system could take the form of associated doctors with common policy positions about various drugs. Of course, some groups would surely have better credit than others: A few would just be dating services for snake-oil sellers and hypochondriacs. Others would be so careful that they would decertify even useful drugs like Vioxx, seeing their small but real dangers.

Let drug companies and doctors compete among themselves, but also let them realize that there is money to be made in wise stewardship of legitimate goods–to say nothing of how wise stewardship would also extend the profitable life of their chemical compounds. Might the public good of antibiotics eventually disappear?

Am I nuts? Or am I really onto something? Has anyone thought of this before? And are there any weaknesses to it? I’m really dying to know…

I support the legalization of recreational drugs as a matter of course. A good start would be to legalize cannabis products, psychedelics, and other drugs that are not physically addictive. We can negotiate the hard drugs later, but taking this one step would solve many of America’s problems at once.

First, it would reduce the demand for extra-legal violence to enforce the validity of transactions in the cannabis market (we call this “gang violence” when we want to scare the young ‘uns). Letting consumers sue in court when they buy adulterated pot–rather than leaving hit men as their only recourse–would do wonders for our inner cities. A blanket pardon of nonviolent users now incarcerated would do much to solve our prison overcrowding problem. This is to say nothing of the bad drug experiences that legalization would also eliminate, as purity and quality standards emerged.

I have mixed feelings about the prescription drug system, though. Let’s consider two examples, COX-2 inhibitors and antibiotics.

I have been following the recent controversies about Vioxx and Bextra with some concern. Both were withdrawn–”voluntarily,” we are told–after it was revealed that these drugs may be linked to an increased risk of heart attack and stroke.

Full disclosure: I bought stock in Merck, the maker of Vioxx, near the bottom of the market collapse that came when Merck withdrew the drug. Since then, I’ve seen a nice return on my investment–but I’ve also seen the awful things that politics can do to suffering people.

To the extent that it hid information about patient risk, Merck deserves some share of the blame. I suspect that we have not heard everything there is to hear in this department, and it’s possible that we never will.

But to the extent that the FDA brought about the withdrawal of Vioxx through intimidation, it too deserves blame: Many patients, though certainly not all of them, would have used Vioxx despite the elevated risks of heart attack and stroke that it brings. They should be allowed to do so. Moreover, the fear of FDA punishment almost certainly had something to do with Merck’s reluctance to address concerns about the risks of Vioxx in the first place.

Vioxx is a painkiller, but it’s not something you’d reach for on a whim. It’s a specialized drug for people who suffer severe arthritis and can’t get relief elsewhere. Many of these patients are so debilitated that they might just find Vioxx worth the risk, if only to live a more normal life. The small chance of heart attack can be ignored when the alternative is never leaving the bed, or when other medications have had even worse side effects. I think that patients should be able to make these choices themselves, evaluating the risks based on the scientific data and the advice of their doctors.

I can imagine a system where anyone could go to a doctor and get advice about taking any drug at all, from aspirin to heroin. I can also imagine that these same doctors might be able to prescribe all of them or to refrain from prescribing when they felt the situation demanded it.

I can also imagine a system where a patient could decide freely to ignore his doctor’s advice. Should we not have the right to do this? Of course it is risky to ignore the pros, and that’s exactly why so few individuals would reach for the medical wholesale catalog even in my libertarian pharmaco-utopia. It just wouldn’t be worth the risk, and all sensible people would know it.

There have been times in my life, however, where I wished to God that I could reach for such a catalog–and it was not so that I could use recreational drugs. Being able to order antibiotics without a prescription would have saved me several weeks of solid misery on two different occasions.

In both these instances, my doctor just wouldn’t listen to my complaints–even while I knew exactly what the proper course of action should have been. Without getting into the details too much, I can say with confidence that I would have bet my life on being right in both situations. And both times, other doctors confirmed my diagnosis, issued me the drugs I needed, and had the satisfaction of watching over a quick recovery.

Here is where things get difficult for me, though. Antibiotics have peculiar properties. If you fail to take the full course that you are prescribed, your disease may well return. That which did not kill it has made it stronger, and now you have a drug-resistant plague that could easily pass to other people. In the meantime, the overall effectiveness of the antibiotic has waned for the rest of us.

In the libertarian pharmaco-utopia, what is to prevent people from taking antibiotics for light and frivolous reasons, from taking them inappropriately, and from ruining the public good that is the antibiotic drug’s special relationship to the microbe it combats?

It would take only a few people to ruin antibiotics for the rest of us. These drugs only work so long as the microbes don’t catch up to them–and we only get the full benefit of the drug so long as everyone in the environment uses it properly. Unlike COX-2 inhibitors, the risks and benefits of antibiotics are distributed across the population.

Don’t tell me that everyone should have a right to use antibiotics however they wish, and that I must let the consequences fall where they may. Were this policy enacted, the next time I get sick, my chances of getting better would be considerably smaller. It is different in degree, but not in kind, from someone dumping their trash on my lawn, and it ought to be treated similarly; both are attacks on my life and well-being.

So what’s to be done?

I’ve been linked by a blog called Stalinist Orange. I have no idea what it means. Fortunately, its proprietor seems more or less to share my own politics–rather than those of his blog’s namesakes. Neither the House of Orange nor the Soviet Union gets a favorable mention here.

So now I’m wondering. Is it like A Clockwork Orange? Or does Stalin have a connection to oranges that I’m not aware of? Or does Brian Radzinsky just have something against oranges? I know I hate bananas, but I’d never do this to them.

Help me out here. I can already tell I’m going to lose sleep over this one if you don’t.

Update: Here’s the explanation, just as some of us suspected.

It’s tempting to think that the coming age of video surveillance poses insuperable challenges to civil liberties. But sometimes, the cameras are a peaceful protester’s best friend. This comes via the New York Times:

Dennis Kyne put up such a fight at a political protest last summer, the arresting officer recalled, it took four police officers to haul him down the steps of the New York Public Library and across Fifth Avenue.

“We picked him up and we carried him while he squirmed and screamed,” the officer, Matthew Wohl, testified in December. “I had one of his legs because he was kicking and refusing to walk on his own.”

Accused of inciting a riot and resisting arrest, Mr. Kyne was the first of the 1,806 people arrested in New York last summer during the Republican National Convention to take his case to a jury. But one day after Officer Wohl testified, and before the defense called a single witness, the prosecutor abruptly dropped all charges.

During a recess, the defense had brought new information to the prosecutor. A videotape shot by a documentary filmmaker showed Mr. Kyne agitated but plainly walking under his own power down the library steps, contradicting the vivid account of Officer Wohl, who was nowhere to be seen in the pictures. Nor was the officer seen taking part in the arrests of four other people at the library against whom he signed complaints.

A sprawling body of visual evidence, made possible by inexpensive, lightweight cameras in the hands of private citizens, volunteer observers and the police themselves, has shifted the debate over precisely what happened on the streets during the week of the convention.

For Mr. Kyne and 400 others arrested that week, video recordings provided evidence that they had not committed a crime or that the charges against them could not be proved, according to defense lawyers and prosecutors.

Crossposted at Liberty & Power.