The Garden

I’ll level with you: I’m a “conspiracy theorist.” Although I think the label “not a sucker” is more accurate (not least because most others I find in the conspiracy theorist camp are still suckers), I’m not going to belabor the point. After all, what’s in a name right? Anyway, having said that, it should come as no surprise that I think the spectacle of national elections is nothing but a sophisticated charade. More to the point, I don’t think that casting ballots ultimately counts for anything.

There are two ways I could argue this point. One is to say that the voting system is broken (or corrupted) and that whatever the final tally happens to be, it does not necessarily match the popular opinion; the second is to say that, regardless of whether or not the ballot system is accurate, the quality of the “choices” listed on the ballot are not different enough from each other to count as real choices.

Regarding the former, I think it is worth appreciating how little voters actually know about how their votes are counted. For whatever reason, the majority of voters simply assume that their ballots go wherever it is they’re supposed to go and get counted exactly as they should be counted. It’s a wonderful way to live life—you know, pretending that everything works exactly as advertised—but the reality of the matter is that there is just as much reason to suspect that the system is flawed as there is to suspect that the system is flaw-less. To illustrate this point, let me draw an analogy with money.

On Sep. 10, 2001, the then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld publicly stated before the Defense Department the following: “According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions.” Yeah, you read that right—2.3 TRILLION dollars…missing. Oops. Whether you think that was a result of simple accounting errors, gross negligence or outright corruption, it is nevertheless suggestive of how carefully our government can handle the counting and tracking of things.

If you don’t like that analogy, fine—maybe 2.3 trillion dollars isn’t comparable in value to our precious votes—but what if I told you that your own Supreme Court decided that your votes don’t need to be counted? If you bear with me, we can go back to the 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore. After issues of improperly tallied votes in Florida, the U.S. Supreme Court decided that an accurate recount of the votes in question was unnecessary, and subsequently granted the election to Bush. Maybe I don’t understand because I’m not on the Supreme Court (nor am I a lawyer for that matter), but isn’t it imperative that for an election to be legitimate that all votes (especially deciding votes) be counted and counted accurately? If all votes are not counted, and your Supreme Court says they don’t need to be counted, then isn’t your voting system a little flawed? Or are things like, way different now that it’s 2008?

The second argument I have against voting is, in my opinion, the more powerful of the two, mostly because it holds irrespective of whether votes are accurately counted. This argument claims that the quality and diversity of viable presidential candidates is consistently too low to render our elections legitimate. Abstractly, to “vote” implies that one have “choices;” but more pointedly, for a vote to have “value,” the options between which the voter chooses must be diverse enough to faithfully represent all real options. In other words, the more choices a voter has to choose from, the more valuable their vote becomes. Think of it like apples. If I grab two apples from a barrel of rotten apples and ask you which one you would rather eat, regardless of which apple you ultimately choose, I’ve nevertheless discovered nothing about your taste in apples; nor have you gained anything useful in terms of lunch. Likewise, if a presidential election involves a mere two candidates, both sponsored from one of two gigantic, dogmatic, and wealthy political parties, is a choice amongst them really saying all that much? I am aware that there are third party candidates floating around (who, by the way, are consistently excluded from major televised presidential “debates”), but instead of assuming that they sufficiently fill-in the gaps left by the two major parties, why not look at all the options? Choosing not to vote is always one of those options.

What does it mean to “choose” not to vote? Despite popular belief, choosing not to vote does not mean that one is no longer politically active. On the contrary, intentional non-voters are arguably the most politically active citizens. I say this primarily because they recognize that the severity to which our country has gone astray cannot be dealt with on the level of voting alone. To put it bluntly, voting is a ridiculously simple, one-dimensional activity that literally anyone (informed or not) can do. It requires nothing in terms of intelligence, awareness or involvement. In my opinion, those that feel voting is enough to declare that they’ve “done their part” to better this country are both lazy and shortsighted—not only is voting easy, it has no prescriptive power (i.e. just because a politician says he’ll do X if you vote for him, that doesn’t mean your vote can make him do X once he’s in office).

More than anything, this country needs intelligent discourse over substantive issues—something that the empty cheerleading and sloganeering of today’s campaigns cannot possibly provide. Substantive discourse requires far more than simple “lesser of evils” thinking—it requires careful, attentive and unrestricted thought. By choosing not to vote, one not only chooses not to limit the scope of their political involvement to mere voting, but they also choose not to compromise their unique beliefs and ideas in order to fit in to one of two mainstream parties. By removing the impetus to conform to one party or another, an intentional non-voter maintains his or her integrity and ability to think clearly and openly, thus preserving their capacity to participate in substantive discourse.

Albert Einstein is supposed to have said that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results; voting sure has been tried over and over again, why think this upcoming election will be any different?

After suffering yet another painful school shooting last week Thursday at Northern Illinois University, our country has been forced to attempt to make sense out of the event and decide how to react to it.  While school shootings are incredibly tragic events and unavoidably elicit emotions of heartache and sorrow from people all over the world, it is less obvious how events like the NIU and Virginia Tech school shootings should affect our attitudes about the way we subsequently approach our daily lives.  One specific reaction that is likely to follow from the NIU shooting that I would like to address is the attitude of fear.

The attitude of fear is a common reaction to traumatic events, and naturally so.  Indiscriminate acts of violence like the shooting at NIU carry an especially high potential for a fear response because of the worry that it could happen again anywhere and at anytime.  Given that we are members of a university, the fear can reach even higher levels since our daily setting mirrors that of NIU and Virginia Tech’s.  This fear, while natural, must nevertheless be handled carefully.

The way I see it, fear is a very useful short-term emotion.  In the event that a dangerous situation arises, the fear that kicks in can enhance a person’s ability to deal with imposing threats.  However, if fear becomes a long-term emotion, one’s ability to ration and think critically is curtailed by the intensity of the fear emotion.  It is this long-term fear response that we must be cautious about.

The unpredictability of a school shooting very easily leads one to the conclusion that more security measures are necessary to prevent future shootings from taking place.  Possible examples of this include the demand for an increased police or security presence, harsher consequences for criminal behavior, or more pervasive surveillance systems that reveal more of a person’s private life to authorities.  Alternatively, if one does not have confidence that any preventative measure would be effective, they may decide to heighten their own suspicions around unfamiliar faces or even attempt to withdraw from society altogether.

Even though all of these reactions are more or less understandable given the tragic nature of a school shooting, there is another reaction that I feel is even more important than the fear-based reactions: compassion.

In the face of severe violence, it is difficult to find feelings of compassion for others besides the victims of the violence, your own family and your own friends, because suspicions are likely to run high.  When we are afraid of what happened, or of what might happen, we are more likely to treat each other with suspicion.  This suspicion, in my opinion may, in turn, diminish the amount of compassion we feel for one another.  This, if accurate, is a counterproductive attitude to hold toward the strangers around us.  I say this because humans are inherently social creatures, and, for that feature of humanity to be realized, we need to be optimistic about our ability to trust one another.  If we decide to react with an increased feeling of compassion toward each other instead of fear and suspicion, we may, at least in the long-term, develop a stronger, safer community in which extreme violence is less-common.

Now, I realize that compassion may not seem like much of a solution to the problem of indiscriminate school shootings—in many ways, in fact, it isn’t—but, with all things considered, the more immediate and overt fear-based varieties of reactions do not seem all that promising either.  Unfortunately, the nature of school shootings is an incredibly complex psychological problem to which there is no simple, straightforward solution.  What I propose is that we embrace the complexity of these events and attempt to think about them as calmly and clearly as we can.  To do this, we must find an antidote to the fear we often carry with us because the fear can distort our thinking.  The more attention we devote to the positive aspects we find daily in one another, the more likely we will preserve the qualities of trust and civility that make our communities worth living in.

Yeah, so Valentine’s Day is this week. Super. I think this is the perfect time to tell you why this supposed “holiday” is nothing but a bunch of crap.

First of all, I’m a male. That means that, statistically, Valentine’s Day is designed to frustrate the hell out of me and make my life (a normally smooth sailing enterprise) ten times harder. According to history.com, about one billion Valentine cards are exchanged per year and women purchase about 85 percent of all Valentine’s gifts. If you do the math, you’ll find that only 15 percent of Valentines sales are due to men. 15 percent. What does that tell you about male opinions of Valentine’s Day? It tells you that the majority of males out there despise this pinkish, flowery fiasco—for good reason too if you ask me.

The mysterious origin of this stupid holiday notwithstanding, there are more than enough reasons to boycott this banal attempt at “love” on February 14 by looking at its incarnation today.

Today, Valentine’s Day is a Hallmark Holiday if ever there was one. The retail business plans for this “holiday” months in advance by preparing all their “special,” mass-produced, and heavily advertised Valentine’s Day “goodies” for all those love-birds out there to gobble up. How romantic. I know how great I would feel if a significant other of mine took time out of her busy schedule to stop in at Walgreen’s, pick up a pretty little $2.95 Valentine’s Day card—written by some faceless Hallmark employee—sign her name on it, attach a heart shaped box of novelty chocolates—manufactured by some guy named Russell Stover—and then give me the package as if it were the perfect (not to mention unique!) symbol of her love. Somehow, I fail to find enthusiasm for this most “thoughtful” of gestures.

Maybe I’m more of a romantic than I thought, but it seems to me that real love is the sort of thing that happens regardless of some arbitrarily chosen and impersonal date of annual romantic celebration. I’m going to be bold here and say that those who take Valentine’s Day most seriously are probably the ones that are the least in love. Anyone who really is in a healthy, loving relationship with another would have no need to make a big fuss over an artificial holiday like Valentine’s Day. Instead of doing something to “show they care” on the day everyone else is “showing they care,” partners truly in love would be caring for each other virtually every day of the year; and, if they do happen to do something “special” on a particular day, at least that day would be uniquely meaningful to them personally and no one else. This idea of Valentine’s Day—the letting “the day define the love” rather than having “the love define the day”—leads to my next complaint.

Valentine’s Day creates way too much unnecessary anxiety for those not in the relationship “club” when February 14 rolls around. The public commotion stirred up around Valentine’s Day leaves those leading the single’s life (or those in malfunctioning relationships for that matter) feeling left out of something. Some have started referring to February 14 as “Singles Awareness Day” to illustrate the way Valentine’s Day creates a sort of clique that excludes outsiders from all the fun. As a result of this, many people will seek out others to couple up with just to get through the 14th without being alone—to “fit in” with the rest of the clique. What a pile of crap.

The term “materialism” and the term “physicalism” are closely related, but I would like to take a moment to define each as I use them.

Materialism refers to a belief about the world which holds that everything that exists, or everything that is real, is fundamentally material and governed by the laws of physical reality. It is a metaphysical position that attempts to define the scope of reality. A materialist, then, uses his view to assert that non-materialist propositions (such as the existence of spirits for example) do not exist and are therefore not part of reality.

Physicalism, in contrast, does not attempt to claim that non-physical propositions are false; instead, physicalism simply claims that if non-physical propositions are true, we cannot know them to be true. The physicalist therefore makes the following claim: For every physical event in the world, there is, in principle, a physical cause or set of causes that sufficiently accounts for the physical event in question. Nowhere, according to the physicalist, is it necessary to invoke non-physical entities or events to account for observable physical events; however, unlike the materialist, the physicalist would not assert that non-physical propositions must be false–they very well might exist, but they simply have no impact on physical reality. Physicalism is, therefore, primarily an epistemic position that deals with how we know rather than what we know; even though it has profound implications for the nature of reality.

In short, materialism makes a stronger claim about the world than physicalism does. The materialist denies the possible existence of non-physical reality whereas the physicalist simply claims that there is no need to assert the existence of non-physical realities–physical explanations are all we need to explain the world we observe.

These concepts are important to understand because they seek to define the scope of our reality. If one were to embrace materialism because the view seems intuitive after a cursory examination, then he or she runs the risk of cutting off a potential aspect of their reality that, ultimately, might be worth exploring. If, in fact, we find that there is good reason to suspect the existence of non-physical realities, it will become cumbersome to attempt to straddle both a desire to uphold one’s prior materialistic beliefs and the desire to explore the non-physical possibilities.

I will continue to expand on these concepts of physical reality with the aim of appreciating the challenges a non-materialst/non-physicalist might make. Check back soon for more…

In a testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, January 30th, Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey refused to clearly state whether waterboarding—a form of torture—is legal or illegal. As the head of the United States Department of Justice, the Attorney General has the important responsibility of representing the moral and legal standing of the United States. It is with this in mind that I believe the chilling indifference Mr. Mukasey demonstrated over the issue of waterboarding is an aberration of the moral and legal integrity of the United States.

Insofar as the United States is a civilized nation it should be common practice for United States officials to adhere to the most elementary forms of morality and human decency. Contrary to what Mr. Mukasey’s testimony would have you believe, defining the scope of elementary moral practice is not ambiguous over matters concerning the torturing of human beings. The famous 18th century philosopher Immanuel Kant, for example, very concisely outlined a conception of morality that essentially states the following: Moral behavior, with respect to humans, is such that a person always treat another human being as an end—never merely as a means to an end. Torture, since it is arguably the most flagrant instance of “mere means” treatment conceivable, clearly violates Kant’s simple moral maxim. On that basis alone the United States is obligated to refrain from considering the use of torture as a legal interrogation technique—that is, of course, assuming that the United States wishes to remain civilized.

Some may argue, however, that waterboarding is not clearly torture, and, therefore, that it may not compromise the moral standing of the United States if it were used. Now, I have no idea how one might make the case that waterboarding is not torture (it is a simulated execution after all), but even if such a claim were granted, Mukasey’s own testimony is sufficient to demonstrate how waterboarding violates Kant’s simple standard for evaluating moral behavior. In his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Mukasey stated that the legality of the waterboarding technique depended on “the heinousness of doing it, the cruelty of doing it balanced against the value…of what information you might get.” This is quintessential means-end reasoning. Essentially, Mukasey is arguing here that the ends (information) justify the means (waterboarding)—precisely the antithesis of Kant’s moral maxim.

Even though the immorality of torture is the most important argument against its use, there is yet another convincing reason to remove it from the list of possible interrogation techniques: It doesn’t work.

According the Army’s own Field Manual on intelligence interrogation, “The use of force, mental torture… or exposure to unpleasant and inhumane treatment of any kind is prohibited by law and is neither authorized nor condoned by the US Government. Experience indicates that the use of force is not necessary to gain the cooperation of sources for interrogation. Therefore, the use of force is a poor technique, as it yields unreliable results, may damage subsequent collection efforts, and can induce the source to say whatever he thinks the interrogator wants to hear.”

For those who feel that special circumstances, like hypothetical “ticking time-bomb” scenarios, prevent the option of torture from being taken off the table completely, the burden is on you to demonstrate why. It is sickening enough to consider that torture—the abuse of the most basic of human rights—could be used as the means toward the end of “information gathering;” but, it is utterly monstrous to consider that torture could be used toward no further end whatsoever. Since it is well understood that torture yields “unreliable results,” it seems as though the latter scenario is inevitable wherever torture is used. In that sense then, torture becomes its own end—a completely intolerable possibility. In light of this, any country that condones torture, either by actively using it or considering its possible use, is entertaining a position that is so grotesque it has no business calling itself “civilized.”