Tag: values

A Real American Hero

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Lost in all the political bickering about the torture memos is are two significant questions. Does torture work? And is it compatible with American values? As an experienced interrogator who worked in Iraq Matthew Alexander has been speaking out on those two questions since at least November of 2008. I consider him a real hero because of his answers to those two questions and also because he is working so hard to advance this crucial debate so that our citizens may understand what is really at stake.

I really liked one quote from a Washington Post interview he did in November 2008:

My experiences have landed me in the middle of another war — one even more important than the Iraq conflict. The war after the war is a fight about who we are as Americans. Murderers like Zarqawi can kill us, but they can’t force us to change who we are. We can only do that to ourselves. One day, when my grandkids sit on my knee and ask me about the war, I’ll say to them, “Which one?”

By the way, his short answers to those two questions are “Not really” and “Absolutely not!” (My answers have always been “I have no experience with it but I suspect not” and “Absolutely not!”)

Tags Iraq, liberty, media, torture, values

culture National

What Should We Do About It?

Post author By David
Post date April 3, 2009
16 Comments on What Should We Do About It?

Recently someone shared The Obama Deception with me (and others) asking for feedback. Normally I would not take two hours to watch such a video because these efforts rarely shed any real light on their subjects. Mostly, they just generate heat through friction. I decided that in the interest of giving an honest response and out of respect for the person who shared it I would take the time. I’m glad that I did so that I could know what I was responding to, and so that I could share the best 8 seconds of the video which come from nearly the end of the two hours.

My reaction to the whole video is to admit that there is an element of truth in it – as there usually is to reports of conspiracy theories. Also common among such reports is the fact that the reality is generally less sinister than the report would have you believe. It’s always helpful to refer back to Hanlon’s Razor:

Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence. (or similar variations)

I don’t mean to suggest that everyone in our government is incompetent – only that the assumption of malice in everything they do does nothing to help us act appropriately as we learn of poor or misguided actions.

My thought as I viewed the video was to ask myself, "what actions would they have people take?" Similarly, my thought whenever I am acquiring new information is to ask myself "what should I do about it?" The reason that I liked those 8 seconds of video is that they addressed that question. (After two hours I was surprised that they did address my question.)

My experience in asking that question has been that no matter how varied the problems in government, the answer to that question is generally some variation on the same theme. Study the Constitution and promote a culture of individual liberty in our own actions and within our government. In order to do that we have to understand what a culture of individual liberty is. For one thing, it means that we have to let go of the assumption that the government can or should solve many of our social problems. The role of government is not to make sure that the playing field is level – it is to ensure that nobody cheats.

Government cannot ensure a level playing field because each individual is different and not equal. No matter how much I might try to imagine otherwise the fact is that I can’t compete with Alex Rodriguez in baseball, LeBron James in basketball, or Tiger Woods in golf. The government is only there to enforce the rules of fairness. No matter how sophisticated a handicapping system they devise I will never be able to beat Tiger at a fair golf game. The rules are not to make sure that I score somewhere close to my competitor, they are to make sure that Tiger does not choose to take a mulligan or sign an inaccurate scorecard and that I don’t do those things either. On the other hand, the rules do not prevent Tiger from spotting me a shot or two (per hole) in the interest of keeping the game interesting.

In case anyone is wondering, individual liberty does not mean that the course owners can’t enforce a dress code despite the fact that my breaking the dress code does not give me any advantage in the game. In other words, the argument that "I’m not hurting anyone but myself" is not sufficient reason to strike down a law (contrary to what many libertarians might argue). It is acceptable for us to codify into law the values that we want to promote within our society.

Tags Constitution, liberty, questions, sports, values

culture

Cultural Vacuum

I got thinking after Carl asked why I don’t talk about how the government should be focused on supporting the family. Carl is absolutely right that the no-such-thing-as-standard modern family is at the root of all of our social problems. What I have been realizing as I have thought about how we can support the family as the social unit where values that lead to good citizenship and productive adulthood can be fostered is that we have created a Catch-22 for ourselves.

Carl wants to know how government can be used to support the family structure while I contend that only family can support and improve the family structure. As I tried to consider how we might go about removing government from meddling in family matters I realized that doing so would create a vacuum in our social structure because of how much we have come to depend on the government to lend any value to the family concept. Couples get married often for little other reason than to procure the legal or material benefits of marriage conferred by the government. Among the fundamental purposes of families is to provide an environment where children can be taught those skills which are necessary to make them into healthy and productive adults. (Productive being defined as having something to contribute to society.) We have turned over the responsibility for educating our children to the government on an almost universal scale. At the elementary level of education we have developed an opt-out model that is compulsory (you can’t simply opt-out, you must opt out on terms that the educational establishment has agreed to). In higher education the majority of institutions are state funded and state run. Even at private institutions, the largest individual source of funding for students is provided by the government in the form of grants and loans.

The more we receive from the government the more we begin to expect and demand from the government. The more we rely on the government the less we feel inclined to support and be supported by our families. As the government has come to provide all the necessities of health and retirement benefits for the elderly there has been less incentive for children to take any responsibility to care for their aging parents. On the other end, since the government is fully integrated in the family structure and responsible to provide the education, and fill the time of the children through school in place of parents, it becomes more and more common for children to abandon their families, through emancipation or by simply running away, before they are ready and able to take full responsibility for their own care.

As I write I realize that the solution is simple, though difficult. The solution is for families to shoulder the burden of responsibility for educating their children. This does not mean that they cannot have their children in public schools (although to a degree that adds some inherent difficulty to the process) but it does mean that they accept that they are the final authority on what should be taught and they must be willing to fill in the inevitable gaps in any education received outside the home. Besides taking back the responsibility for educating their children, families must also teach their children to demand less from their government – this is one gap that will always be present in a public school education. As each generation takes more of the responsibilities back from the government which naturally devolve to the family the government will have to shrink and the family will once again regain its rightful place in society.

If this practice of families bringing family responsibilities back inside the home were widespread for two generations we would once again have a limited government that provided the protections, structure, and services that had been outlined in the Constitution and we would have a healthy society that would be less prone to the excesses and instability that we see in our nation today.

Tags citizenship, discourse, family, learning, prediction, values

culture life

Anti-Materialism

From two very different sources today I was pointed toward two very similar views regarding our overly materialistic society. Misty Fowler linked to Winning the Rat Race by Quitting it:

We are a country obsessed with consumption, which would be fine if we seemed to be fulfilled getting bigger TVs but having less time to watch them. But, in the aggregate, that’s not the case. . .

So why the ceaseless search for stuff? In a word, competition. It’s worth it to stay ahead in the rat race. . . Winning the competition is more important than having a yard, it turns out. Which is why economists call these “positional goods” — goods whose worth is deeply tied into their position vis-a-vis your direct “competitors” (which is to say neighbors, friends, etc.).

On the other hand, not all goods are positional. Some make us happy simply because they make us happy. Another question asked whether respondents would prefer a world in which they had two weeks of vacation and everyone else got one, or a world in which they had four weeks of vacation and everyone else got eight. Here, positional concerns did not interject, and the majority chose the larger number of days off. The amount of time your neighbor spends with his family does not diminish the amount of time you spend with yours.

The problem is, positional goods tend to appear to be the most pressing purchases. . . And because money is finite, these purchases “crowd out” what you could spend on more enduring generators of happiness — forcing you, for instance, to work more hours to support a larger mortgage than you needed, thus losing the time you could otherwise spend enjoying family and friends, and leaving you less happy.

But there’s an easy solution. Stop. Pull out of the competition. Seriously ask whether you want to continue trading away your time for your stuff. And that requires ignoring what your neighbors have. It requires shutting your eyes against short-term incentives and trying to remember what actually makes you happy.

Tim Ferriss wrote about a group that is doing just that – and they have been doing it for two years.

The group called themselves The Compact, after the Mayflower Compact, and pledged that for the entire year, they would purchase secondhand or borrow everything they needed, except for food and essentials like toiletries and medicine. . .

Sounds hard? They say it wasn’t. They shopped less overall and got creative when they needed specific items. They reserved “shopping” for times when there was something they really couldn’t do without. When Perry needed a pressure cooker to prepare vegetarian dishes for his partner and their two children, he found a used one on the Internet. Pelmas and her husband, who are renovating their home, found secondhand appliances and recycled wood for baseboards and cabinets. But they were stumped by how to find used nails, screws, and hinges, and broke down and bought them new instead — the only time they cheated. Pelmas also struggled with finding sports sunglasses for rowing. Never able to find a used pair, she taped up her old ones and kept using them instead. . .
About 8,000 people have joined the e-mail list The Compact created to discuss the project, and groups modeled after The Compact have sprouted in 38 communities across the United States and in countries including Romania, New Zealand, and Japan. You can read more about The Compact on its blog at sfcompact.blogspot.com.

We have not gone so extreme as The Compact, but we have learned that we are happier as we have consciously tried to avoid falling into the trap of wanting everything we are supposed to want. I don’t need a second car and I don’t need a new computer every couple of years. Instead we try to make decisions about what will bring us happiness without reference to what anyone else has or wants.

Tags connections, economics, materialism, values