The Myth of Liberal Peaceniks

Conor Friedersdorf posted an article in today's online Atlantic with the title
The Most Dangerous Myth: That Liberals Are Peaceniks. The short reply to this is "Duh!" However, I felt compelled to write a longer answer as follows. Naturally I can only speak for myself but I've had a few people congratulate me for providing a succinct description of liberal attitudes toward war.


Of course we aren't [peaceniks], and never have been. I object to unnecessary wars and wars of adventure. I object to war by proxy and the use of force before all diplomatic venues have been exhausted.


I agree with the necessity of war for common defense and honoring our treaties. I agree with the use of military force to intervene when we're invited to do so. I agree with joining in a military coalition where there's broad support to stop attempts at genocide or similar crimes against humanity.


I do not agree with invading a country because we're greedy for their resources or because we wish to install a government that's friendly to us. I do not agree with war as an immediate option; I think it should always be the option of last resort. Carry the big stick, fine, but be cautious with its use. Don't insist on a stick bigger than you need to get the job done.

Work Ethic

We're rapidly approaching a world of post-scarcity, at least within the developed parts of it. We control vast amounts of wealth and resources and produce enough food and material goods to supply the entire world. This is a major achievement for our species; we have effectively mastered our planet to make it comfortable for us as we choose. It's not perfect of course, and many areas lag behind unacceptably but because of artificial boundaries we place on regions and cultures we shrug it off as not our problem.

In the developed world our advancement has progressed to the degree that we're starting to revert to service jobs rather than production. We're creating work for people so they can work rather than providing a specific purpose for that work. Particularly in the US we're skeptical of public support programs that allow people to live without slaving away at a job because we consider it an abuse of the system. But how do you define abuse? This is a ridiculous Puritan ethic that says the only way you can justify your existence is if you either work yourself to death or you have enough money to justify not working. How much money you have defines not only how much you're allowed to enjoy life but how successful you've become.

I've been frustrated by this mindset for years. Aren't there other standards to define a successful life? What if you've been a good parent? There's no money in that. What about artists like Vincent van Gogh who dedicated their lives to art but were never recognized during their own lifetimes?

According to far too many people, living on the public dole while pursuing your own passion is abuse of that system. My question is: why?

Pope Francis I

We're approaching the end of the new pope's first year on the throne and he seems to be a popular guy. A genuine ascetic who sneaks out of the Vatican at night to minister to the poor. This is good stuff that looks really good in the papers. In the meanwhile he's reaffirmed the Vatican's policy on homosexuality and homosexuals, women's rights and pedophile priests.

The Vatican's problems are legion. They're hemorrhaging members, mostly among the younger generations and they're plagued by corruption. Thanks to the Age of Information we live in they can't hide these problems like they once could, so they hired a Fox News reporter (I can't call anyone from Fox News a "journalist") as a media adviser to manage their image.

Ponder that a moment. They hired someone from one of the most demonstrably dishonest media organizations to manage their image. Consider what this means for their intentions.

Obviously there's a great deal of pressure on the organization to address their problems and institute reform. Shortly after Greg Burke signs on Pope Benedict XVI, affectionately referred to by many as Pope Palpatine, steps down from the throne to live in seclusion at a nunnery. Many people saw Benedict as directly responsible for the Church's woes as he was in charge of the department that decided policy to shift pedophile priests around to avoid prosecution and intimidate families of sex abuse victims into remaining silent. Enter Cardinal Bergoglio with his lifelong message of compassion for the poor elected to take Benedict's place under the ruling name of Francis I. Pope Francis quickly shocks the world by suggesting that atheists can be good people after all (welcome to the Twentieth Century, Frank) and furthermore it's not his place to judge homosexuals (although it's still his god's place and they're still not allowed to get married or enjoy equal rights).

The world is abuzz with the news. Pope Francis is a genuinely nice guy! He urges the world to be generous and give to the poor! He denounces "trickle down" economics (again, welcome to the Twentieth Century, Frank)! He puts the golden throne in storage and sits on a wooden stool! Like I said, this is good stuff.

So here's my problem: we've seen this sort of re-branding before. Does anyone else remember "compassionate conservatism"? I was willing to give George W. Bush the benefit of the doubt when he was first elected and he gave me cause to regret it. I therefore reserve the right to be skeptical until I see action that matches the rhetoric. So what has Pope Francis I done to back up his new message? Not a lot.

He suspended but has not removed the "Bishop of Bling" Franz-Peter Tebartz-van Elst, one of the most egregious examples of corruption within the Catholic world. As previously noted he sneaks out of the Vatican at night to minister to the homeless. He established a Pontifical Commission to study the Vatican bank problems. And he...has made a lot of speeches.

The Pope is supposed to be a spiritual leader, but he also wields considerable temporal power. He's the top executive of the Vatican and he directs policy as he chooses. He could divest the Vatican of a fraction of its incalculable wealth to fund his directive to minister to the poor, but the golden throne and billions in art remain in storage. He could change the Vatican's support of anti-gay propaganda to focus on anti-poverty initiatives. He could do so many things just to support the message he's espousing, but he's taken no concrete action on any of it.

Color me unimpressed.

Some people claim that the Pope is not the absolute ruler and can't simply force change against the wishes of Christendom. The pope's official title suggests otherwise: he's the "supreme pontiff" and "sovereign of the state of the Vatican City" which means he has absolute authority where the Vatican is concerned.

But if he pushes change that challenges the status quo he might get assassinated! Well, true. But the Church has a long tradition of martyrdom. If he's a true believer and a genuine agent of change then this shouldn't be a consideration. But perhaps that's unreasonable of me, so let me ask this: why are they spending so much money on the Swiss Guard if not to guard against that?

It's possible that Frank is just spending his first year building momentum for the change he intends to bring. If that's the case I will change my tune. However, until I see action in support of the message I will give the only judgment possible: Pope Francis' message is a whitewash for the church intended to distract from the Church's problems rather than address them. Based on the reactions I'm seeing even from some of my fellow atheists and agnostics, it's working.

Atheism

A former pastor's journal A Year Without God has been generating some buzz so I took a look around. On the whole I approve of his approach. He starts out with some misconceptions, but the religious community clings to those misconceptions so I can't say I blame him for it.

Not everyone who gives atheism a try is going to find it to their liking. It is a genuinely scary outlook. There are no gods to offer comfort, no afterlife in which to reunite with loved ones, no divine plan to ease our confusion in this messy and complicated world. Of course an atheist would point out that this was always true, it's just that we now acknowledge it. The world is the same whether or not we worship one of the thousands of gods we've invented over the millennia, the only thing that's different is the solutions we construct to address our problems.

Let's start with some misconceptions. There are atheists who still pray, believe in ghosts and other supernatural phenomenon and so forth. Such individuals are still atheists, they're just not very skeptical. Most atheists who pray do so out of habit, acknowledging that they're talking to themselves to make themselves feel better. When we face crisis it often comforts us to fall back on familiar routine. As for belief in ghosts and magic an atheist is not necessarily a skeptic (although I think we ought to be). As long as you aren't asserting that a god is the reason behind the ghosts or magic, you can still be an atheist.

Atheists do not hate God, and we're not rebelling against Jesus. Neither do we worship Satan or engage in any religious beliefs. In order for any of that to be true we would have to believe that those are real people, at which point we can't call ourselves atheists. Don't let the Laveyan Satanists fool you, they're atheists who adopt the label of "satanist" ironically. I can't hate, rebel against or worship something I don't believe is real.

Atheists don't reject gods because we want to sin. Sin is defined as a crime against God and if there's no one to commit a crime against then no crime is possible. See above.

Warning us that we're doomed to hell for rejecting God isn't a threat we take seriously. You might as well threaten to punch me in the aura; I won't feel it either way.

Atheists are not inherently immoral. Neither are we inherently superior. We're just people who don't believe in gods, that's all. But if you want to make the claim that we have nothing preventing us from being bad you should probably back up your claim. Penn Jillette explains how that works.

That brings me to the initial misconception from Ryan Bell that caught my attention:

“If I have to be absolutely certain that there is no God, I don’t know if I can ever qualify for that group,” he said.

I see this repeated endlessly. I must have faith to be an atheist because I claim certainty that there are no gods! Well, no. I've been an agnostic for almost twenty years now. I'm still an agnostic and that's unlikely to change. However, just because Thomas Henry Huxley established precedent regarding agnosticism over a hundred years ago doesn't mean that precedent is set in stone. I am an agnostic because I don't know whether or not any gods are real. I am an atheist because I have no reason to believe they are.

I've talked with "gnostic" atheists who assert that they're convinced beyond the shadow of a doubt that gods are false, particularly the ones based on the Abrahamic tradition. They're logically incoherent, internally inconsistent and every claim that can be tested about them has been proven false. I'm glad that the evidence convinces them, but I continue allow for the possibility that I could be wrong. The problem with a claim that can't be falsified is that there's no way to verify that it's true or false. Therefore the only response I can reasonably give is the Scottish verdict of "not proven."

And no, gentle readers. The burden of proof does not rest with me. If you claim your god is real, it's up to you to prove it. It's not my job to chase the ever-moving goalposts to claim that your gods aren't real. I simply rest on skepticism and wait for positive evidence to support the claim. And no, your anecdotes and personal conviction aren't evidence of anything but your willingness to believe. The more tortured the apologetics to explain why your god isn't subject to evidence, the more you convince me that this is simply an exercise to rationalize your belief rather than a belief that's justified.

So good luck to Ryan Bell in his quest to explore life as an atheist. I'm sure he'll find, as I did, that it's not really that different from life as a believer. You still have to pay your bills. You still have to interact with family and friends. You still have to make choices. The primary difference is that the choices are his to make, not his god's. I wish him well.

Revisiting the history of the health insurance mandate.

It seems that the popular conservative apologetic today is to claim that conservatives never introduced or supported mandatory health insurance. Even a casual browse through the public record reveals that claim to be false, but the claim continues to get repeated apparently in hopes of replicating the Big Lie. So for the record (mostly for my own benefit) here's what's on the public record with regard to the GOP's health insurance mandate.

First there's the 1993 GOP counter-proposal to "Hillarycare" taken from the proposal written by the Heritage Foundation. The idea was to force people to join the insurance pool to lower the overall risk just like they do with mandatory auto insurance.

Then there's Romneycare, the Massachusetts health care reform law that the Heritage Foundation claimed credit for helping build based off their original health insurance mandate. Romney and other conservatives continued to hail the Massachusetts law as a model for national health care reform up until the point that Obama used Romneycare experts to help build Obamacare.

That's the point when suddenly conservatives started talking about how the mandate was "unconstitutional," a claim they continue to make long after the mandate was upheld in the Supreme Court. To add insult to injury, Newt Gingrich admitted that the whole reform proposal was a red herring intended to block the Clinton reform proposal back in 1993 and that he never had any intention of allowing it to pass. That's what vindicates Alan Grayson's depiction of the GOP reform plan as "don't get sick. If you do, die quickly."

Thankfully, Forbes includes many of the highlights of the Republican Party's history of the individual mandate.

On poverty, work ethic and bootstraps

A comment on reddit prompted me to write the following. I think it stands well enough without context, but I can provide it if you're really interested.

I think there are a lot of better alternatives to "start your own business and pull yourself up by your own bootstraps." One of them is to recognize that no one operates in a vacuum, and providing support for our least fortunate ought to be our top priority rather than indulging in some fantasy about "tough love."

Another would be abandoning our fetish for Puritan work ethics in a society where scarcity is a matter of public policy rather than necessity. If we started supporting people for following their passions even when those passions aren't lucrative, we might see some surprising results. One of the reasons it's easier to start your own business in most European countries than it is in the US is because the consequences for failure aren't as dire. They don't have to worry about losing their homes or going hungry because they tried and failed.

Debt and Deficit Spending

It's not the mushroom cloud that deficit hawks are claiming it to be. We were promised an economic collapse if we passed the stimulus.

It didn't happen.

We were told that the bond market would punish us for our profligate spending.

It never happened.

We were told that all sorts of horrible things would happen if we didn't reign in our spending now! Now! Now! But none of them happened.

On the flip side, we were told that our recovery would be stalled if we started cutting our spending during a market contraction.

That happened.

We were warned of a "lost decade" similar to what Japan experienced if we followed Japan's economic policy during their market contraction.

That's happening now.

We were warned that high unemployment was going to become the new normal, and that wages would be driven down with the effect of further decreasing demand and cooling the economy.

That's also happening now. Unemployment is falling slower than expected, and with the impact of the government shutdown the markets are starting to treat the US economy as a bad bet.

This isn't rocket science. We've understood this basic macroeconomic principle for decades: you pay down the debt when your economy is in good shape and you spend on credit when the economy is in bad shape. When the economy seemed to be doing well economists like Krugman urged leaders to pay down the debt, but they were told by people like Cheney that "Reagan proved deficits don't matter." Only now that the economy crashed and a Democrat is in the White House are we hearing that the debt is going to kill us in our sleep. I heard predictions of complete economic collapse six months from now as far back as 2008.

It still hasn't happened yet.

So let's stop listening to the people who are consistently wrong about these matters are start listening to the people who demonstrate they actually understand the problem.