Planting seeds

One day at lunch I accidentally got into a discussion with a colleague about vegetarianism, PETA, and ethics.

He ordered vegetarian food at lunch. When I asked him whether he believed people should eat less meat, he stated an ideal (yes, we should eat less meat) and then right away claimed he was unable to act on his ideal because most of the time he doesn't care enough. In response, I said, why not select achievable ideals and then actually achieve them?

Religions give practitioners unachievable rules that set them up for failure. If you give up religion, you are free to give up the idea that ethics are inherently impractical.

I tried to encourage him to be skeptical about people (and organizations like PETA) who pull offensive stunts and manipulate emotions seemingly for the sheer hell of it. I told him I'd read that PETA members once staged a demonstration in which they threw paint at women who were walking down the street in fur coats. No motive justifies destruction of another person's property.

I also said I respect companies more than non-profits because companies are ultimately responsible to customers and industry standards. He seemed to think that because companies sell things for that abominable stuff called money, they obviously have an incentive to cut corners and cheat people, whereas because non-profits like PETA are just trying look out for the underdog, their motives are always pure.

However, it's really the money that motivates companies to behave. If I give a company my money, they give me something in return. They have to give me something that meets my expectations, or they don't get my money and they don't survive. The proof is in the pudding.

If I give PETA my money... well, why would I do that? Only if I felt I should. To ease my conscience or impress others. To survive, PETA's got to make me feel horrified about, say, how cows are slaughtered, even if they have to lie. PETA doesn't care about proof; people who feel sufficiently horrified don't care much about proof either.

Industry associations (none of which has ever tried to trick me out of my money, the Copeland beef commercial notwithstanding) have an incentive to uphold quality and ethical standards in their industries and hold members to account. If people don't trust the meat industry, there will be bad financial implications. Money is an incentive not to cut corners.

I don't claim that businesses never cut corners; people obviously do chase short-term gains by cutting corners sometimes. They're shooting themselves in the foot. I'm claiming that the long-term self-interest of a business is aligned to the interest of the consumer even if the short-term interest of a business seems not to be. People should and often do care about the long term. People who shoot themselves in the foot too many times wind up crippled.

He seemed to listen. At any rate, he didn't do what some people would do, which is get up on a high horse and spew regurgitated ideas. (Whether or not they know it, those people are relying on the dopeler effect: the tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.)

He seemed to say that he went to Canada for school because the contrarian thrill of being a liberal in conservative Texas wears off after a while. On the theory that this colleague is a victim, rather than a perpetrator, of the dopeler effect, I pointed out that being different for the sake of being different is just as bad as being the same for the sake of being the same. Those are two sides of the same coin, and you don't want your opinions to be determined by the flip of a coin. The goal is not to be contrarian or conformist, but to be independent. If being a liberal is the result of rebellion rather than careful consideration, maybe he'll ditch the group identity, or give up (or at least re-examine) some of the sillier ideas of the liberal crowd.

The kind people at a coffee stall we visited were baffled by his request that they reuse the disposable styrofoam coffee cup he'd gotten from them earlier for his second coffee of the day. He actually started exclaiming, explaining to them how many years the stuff takes to degrade.

Maybe he does know a little about how not to back down from things he believes.

The invention of wilderness

http://www.williamcronon.net/writing/Trouble_with_Wilderness_Main.html

The page shows an excerpt from Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, edited by William Cronon, copyright 1995.

The text is pretty dense and intimidating-looking, but interesting. Below is my summary of the ideas, rearranged  a bit.

• We take for granted these days that wilderness is a good thing, better than a civilized urban area. And we can all think of beautiful experiences associated with wilderness. But this wholly good way of looking at wilderness is culturally determined and quite modern.  The word 'wilderness' used to mean  'wasteland'. Historically, wilderness was a scary, useless place; modern ideas about wilderness are ideas about escape.
• In the Bible wilderness was sacred, sublime, or supernatural in addition to being wasteland. The creation of the first national parks in grand places (not swamps) reflects the notion that God can be seen best in grand places. Sublime wilderness was historically conceived (by Thoreau, Wordsworth, and John Muir, for example) as sacred but terrifying and supremely inhospitable to humans.
• By the end of the 19th century, Americans had gotten very sentimental about wilderness, and had started creating national parks. In the first decade of the 20th century, people all over the country were opposing the construction of a dam that would increase the water supply to the city of San Francisco. (The dam was built anyway.) After the Civil War, rich city people increasingly went to the wilderness as tourists for recreation. Thus they lacked a realistic an image of wilderness.
• Ironically, as wilderness was set aside for preservation, it was made less wild. Frontier areas had been the site of conflicts and the home of native tribes. Now they were empty and safe. Civilization is compared to wilderness as if wilderness is an ideal and found lacking. But empty, safe wilderness is a fantasy and a luxury; it is the product only of societies that can afford to create it!
• As the American frontier disappeared, it became more valuable and more idealized. Wilderness was seen as key to American rugged individualism. Frontier life was seen as male; civilization was seen as a female threat to maleness. Preserving wilderness was a civilized man's way of trying to preserve his masculinity.
• Another factor in the re-imagination of wilderness was the rise of primitivism, a desire to retreat from civilization to simpler, supposedly happier times. When primitive people, idealized by civilized people, become civilized themselves, they are considered fallen.
• In various ways, Americans redefined wilderness as a romantic concept loaded with positive emotions similar to the positive emotions inspired by religion. Environmentalists use those powerful emotions to promote agendas that may or may not even relate to wilderness per se. There's a tricky relationship between preserving wilderness and preserving species, for example.
• Defining wilderness strictly as space without humans creates problems. 
• When we hold wilderness as an ideal, we take the benefits of civilization for granted. 
• We confuse debates about conservation. 
• One journalist has argued that because humans have interfered with the entire globe, nature doesn't exist. Nothing is untouched anymore. (But historically we've always been touching nature, and nature undergoes vast changes without our help or consent.)
• The obvious solution for preserving wilderness is to get rid of ourselves! This is as obviously absurd as it is obvious. (Yet environmentalists accept the notion that human beings don't deserve to exist, while nature does. Even farming is considered corruption and sin. Surely we wouldn't consider a global return to hunter-gatherer life a victory?)
• The romanticization of the wilderness pushes the issue of preserving it past all other issues that affect only humans, since preserving wilderness affects nature, which is more important. [In the issue of Rachel Carson's bird eggs vs. humans bit by mosquitoes, clearly the bird eggs would be seen as more important, since they are part of nature and humans aren't.]
• Protecting remote wilderness inconveniences the humans living there.
• The poor suffer the most; they don't have the luxury of treating wilderness as a place for recreation, and they have no resources to spare for conservation efforts.
• We should strive for a more correct view of wilderness.
• Wilderness is part of reality that simply exists. We didn't create it. We can't fully control it. 
• We should appreciate the existing bits of nature that are actually in our lives, not just grand bits of nature in far-off places.
• We should see some of our choices as better or worse for the environment, rather than seeing civilization as wholly bad. 
• Thinking of wilderness as nonhuman helps us remember responsibilities towards nonhuman life. 
• Whatever we do, we will change the world. So we must decide how we wish to change it. 
• Reflection can create sustainable behavior.

If anything, I think the author is too sympathetic to environmentalism, but the notion of wilderness as an artificial, modern luxury is mind-blowing.

I like it that the author comes close to saying that environmentalists are hypocrites for insisting that others comply with impossible ideals conceived in comfort.

I also appreciate it that he touches on the relevance of voluntary human extinction, an extreme seldom mentioned---or considered relevant---in conversations about environmentalism. Kudos.

I'd perhaps like to get my hand on the book, Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature, unless it's mostly about enlightened sustainability. Even enlightened sustainability, I suspect, would trip the red flag that signals unnecessary guilt.

Protesting the wrong thing

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123860422461178769.html

Anticapitalist protesters gathering in London for two days of demonstrations are missing the point. If there is one myth the credit crunch has surely exploded, it is that the financial system is a free market. The world is in a mess because the financial system wasn't capitalist enough.

Information and the rule of law

Full article (need subscription)
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/329a67d8-2859-11de-8dbf-00144feabdc0.html

Quote on another news site
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/04/michael-skapinker-china-needs-reform-to-become-world-class/

Is China’s authoritarian capitalist model in a position to supplant the west’s democratic one? Can China’s one-party system shift its economy from low-cost manufacturing to sophisticated services?

Most people I spoke to said no – not without China becoming a very different society. For China to move to the next stage requires two things, they said: the free flow of information and the rule of law.

Rachel Carson

This article claims that mosquitoes kill more people than Hitler.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2009-04/12/content_11174145.htm

As far as I'm concerned, that means Rachel Carson is at least as evil as Hitler; she scared everybody into thinking DDT kills birds with that book Silent Spring. She's the reason DDT was banned.

We're scared of killing birds, but we're not scared of letting people die of malaria? Not birds, people. Millions of human beings. Bring back the DDT, for heaven's sake.

Intellectual honesty

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/21/science/21belief.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all

“The core of science is not a mathematical model; it is intellectual honesty,” said Sam Harris

--from an email to self dated 14 April 2009

Why this blog?

Because I want to share but not share at the same time.

Sometimes there are things I want to say that just aren't appropriate in the context of daily life, such as ideas that family, co-workers and future employers aren't necessarily going to like. That's what makes me The Wardrobe Objectivist.

On the assumption that my daily life is not going to become filled only with sympathetic Objectivist listeners, I can cope with those things I want to say in a number of ways:

1. Talk about them at work and hope for the best.
2. Talk about them with someone who is more likely to agree with me.
3. Not talk about them at all, with the possible result that I won't think about them either.
4. Write emails to myself about them.
5. Start an anonymous blog where I can talk to what is theoretically the whole internet about them.

So far, I've actually already tried everything but that last one. So here goes.

Sincerely,
TWO