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On the stupid "root causes" debate

2013-04-20T04:33:42Z

One of the few benefits of growing old is seeing that the cycle of society is a cycle of stupidity; that the same moronic arguments come, and the same moronic arguments go, and that at a certain point it really isn't worth the time and effort explaining to the stupid just why they are so stupid.

And so it is with this week's typically feigned outrage over Justin Trudeau's comments, made very early after the bombings of the Boston Marathon, that we should look for the "root causes" of these events. My colleague Andrew Coyne has taken time out of his life to explain why there is nothing objectionable about what Trudeau said:

Recall that Trudeau was speaking in advance of anyone having been named as suspects, or any of their background or possible motives having been identified. We did not know what or whom we were dealing with: an organized conspiracy, or a lone nutter. But he was right to suggest that whoever did it would have to be someone who had become, for one reason or another, detached from basic social norms: as he put it, “who feels completely excluded, completely at war with innocents, at war with a society.”

This is so obvious that it beggars belief that anyone would try to find anything nefarious in Trudeau's remarks. But it brings to mind a similar occasion, over a decade ago now, when Jean Chretien was similarly chastised by the Canadian right for proposing that, as part of its response to the attacks of 9/11, the US government should maybe seek to understand the root causes of the attacks.

For his efforts, Chretien was slammed in the pages of the Wall Street Journal by one Marie Josee Kravis, a quasi-Canadian turned New York socialite whose major claim to fame is having been been one of the most completely clueless members of the board of Hollinger in the early years of the millennium. I was asked to respond to Kravis's column by the opinion page editor of the Ottawa Citizen, long before I ever imagined I might one day work for the paper.

The column I wrote bears the marks of the angry young man posturing that was a signature of my writing at the time, but there's so much of the piece that resonates with the current debate I think it is worth posting in full. To paraphrase Matthew McConaughey in Dazed and Confused: I get older, but the arguments stay just as stupid. Here's the column:

Gagging on U.S. whine: Offering an explanation for terrorism is different from justifying acts of terror. Why can't people understand that?

The Ottawa Citizen

Sat Sep 28 2002

Like Conservative lead-er Joe Clark a few weeks back, I find myself in the curious position of coming to the defence of Jean Chretien.

Once again, our prime minister is under fire for an interview he gave to CBC-TV last summer and for a speech he recently gave at the United Nations, in which he allegedly suggested that "western arrogance" might have contributed to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. This latest salvo, by Marie-Josee Kravis, was published on Thursday in the Wall Street Journal and reprinted on this page yesterday.

Mrs. Kravis's article was so full of twisted analysis and half-explained history that it is hard to know where to begin. So why not begin with the first sentence, which finds Mrs. Kravis wondering, "Why is JeanChretien so intent on finding a justification for terrorism?"

I have read the CBC transcript of the interview a dozen times, and I won't pretend to understand every sentence. But one thing Mr. Chretien was certainly not doing was trying to find a "justification" for terrorism, nor was he "blaming the victim" for the attacks. What he was trying to do was grope toward an understanding of the factors that might have inspired the attacks, and which might lead to similar problems "10 or 20 or 30 years from now."

Setting aside the question of whether "western arrogance" and global wealth disparities are what motivated Osama bin Laden and his crew -- I think not, and it is not obvious from the interview that Mr. Chretien thinks so either -- I fail to see what the fuss is about. Offering an explanation for something is conceptually distinct from offering a justification for it.

It is commonly observed in Canada that factors such as poverty, drug addiction and lack of education can lead to a life of crime. When we point this out, we do not thereby justify the crime, nor do we "blame the victim." This is so obvious it is painful to have to spell it out. Mr. Chretien was simply applying this pattern of domestic analysis to the global community. Again, there is nothing here that hints of what Mrs. Kravis calls "misplaced pity for terrorists."

Mrs. Kravis argues that what poor countries need is better access to world markets, which will give them sustained economic growth. Of course they do. But these countries also need a functioning, vertically integrated civil society, stable government, the rule of law, and civil and political liberties; otherwise, economic reform will simply make things worse. Just look at Russia, where most of the existing social capital was destroyed more than a decade ago by western economic geniuses more in the grip of ideology than good sense.

But don't take my word for it. This leftist "social capital" mumbo-jumbo, including the Russia example, is taken straight from the World Bank's Web site, at www.worldbank.org/poverty/scapital/.

I am sure this is all too soft-headed for Mrs. Kravis. She suggests that Mr. Chretien should learn some lessons from Pierre Trudeau, who knew how to deal with terrorists. Send in the army, arrest anyone who looks suspicious, and refuse to consider any sort of political accommodation. Any Americans getting their Canadian history from Mrs. Kravis's article would have been left with the distinct impression that Quebec separatism was killed off once and for all in 1970, since, as she says, it was "Trudeau's resolve that restored order and deterred future terrorist incidents."

Actually, a more plausible explanation is that the FLQ's violent energies were sublimated into the democratic separatist movement that still exists. Quebec separatists just went from blowing up mailboxes to trying to politically blow up the entire country, and they might well have succeeded if it weren't for 30 years of political accommodation, much of it led by Mr. Trudeau. But again, don't take my word for it, read a history book. Or, if that's too hard, read the entry on the "October Crisis" in the Canadian Encyclopedia.

Halfway through her article, Mrs. Kravis takes leave of her original argument and goes off on a rant about the unbearable lameness of Canadian nationalism. She attributes Mr. Chretien's pro-terrorist feelings to his frustrations with the U.S., and even dusts off the old stuff about anti-Americanism being our unfortunate substitute for a true national feeling and self-confidence. Spare me.

To begin with, even the most hostile reading of Mr. Chretien's remarks doesn't come close to the sorts of things that have appeared in Harper's and the New York Times. Second, Mr. Chretien suggested that the powerful should try to be "nice," which Mrs. Kravis interprets as a bit of pique over President George W. Bush's notorious failure to praise Canada for its post-Sept. 11 support. That is doubtful. If anything, Mr.Chretien meant "be nice" as in "don't give money and guns to evildoers like Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein," -- which the Americans did for a long time.

Mrs. Kravis insinuates that Canadians are hypocritical for feeling morally superior to Americans while enjoying access to U.S. technology, capital and television. Since when are you not allowed to feel superior to the people you're doing business with? Didn't Adam Smith set us all straight on this point? Besides, if you want to talk hypocrisy, let us start with Mr. Bush, the biggest hypocrite of them all.

Probably no man so dim has ever benefited so much from crony capitalism, yet Mr. Bush stands in sanctimonious judgment of the executives of Enron and WorldCom. He promised a "hemisphere of freedom," then slapped trade sanctions on Canadian lumber and jacked up subsidies for U.S. farmers. If there were any consistency to U.S. foreign policy, Saudi Arabia would be part of the axis of evil. And so on.

There is nothing wrong with Canada's national self-confidence that wouldn't be helped if only we had fewer grovelling, pro-Yankee fifth-columnists keeping addresses in Toronto and Montreal so they can dump on Canada and Canadians in newspapers at home and abroad.

There was nothing wrong with what Jean Chretien said to Peter Mansbridge and to the UN. Get over it.

Andrew Potter teaches philosophy at Trent University, Peterborough.

I no longer teach philosophy, at Trent or anywhere. I'm currently the managing editor at the Ottawa Citizen

On the moral corruption of Zero Dark Thirty

2013-01-19T01:16:26Z

It is bad enough that Zero Dark Thirty is a laughably written, poorly plotted, badly directed and exfoliatingly dull telling of the most dramatic manhunt in our lifetimes. It is also completely, uttery, relentlessly immoral.

Kathryn Bigelow's attempt in the LA Times at defending herself on her handling of the torture issue is inept.

Steve Coll eviscerates her in the New York Review of Books.

I join in the pile-on in tomorrow's edition of the Ottawa Citizen, or you can read it online.

By all means see the movie.

A comment on Glen McGregor's "Toward a Dogme95 of political reporting"

2013-01-03T01:54:54Z

I spent the first 17 years of my adult life in academia. I've spent the last five years in journalism. And if there's one thing that has struck me about the career switch, it is that the only people on earth whose sense of self-importance rivals that of humanities professors, it is journalists. Which is why it was so disheartening when a journalist sat down to write something self-critical about his profession's use of academic sources, the people who were quickest to take offense were professors.

At issue is a blogpost by Glen McGregor, a parliamentary reporter for the Ottawa Citizen. His post, entitled "Toward a Dogme95 of political reporting," is a trim little call for a return to journalism's basics: pick up the phone, work sources, get stories. It asks journalists to stop filing easy stories skimmed from the froth of partisan posturing, social media, and self-styled rent-a-quote "experts." Fine advice, and, in my opinion, largely non-controversial. (Note: While I'm Glen's editor at the Ottawa Citizen, I had no input into his blogpost.)

But it's the first bullet point of Glen's post that seems to have got the most attention:

* No more quoting political scientists: It’s lazy and signals the reporter couldn’t find any other apparently neutral or objective source to talk. These people work in academics, not politics, so I’m not interested in their opinions on anything but their own research.

This caused quite a ruckus in the cosy Canadian politics neighbourhood of the twittersphere. A number of academics -- most of whom are well known to journalists and to readers for their comments, op-eds, blogs and in some cases even their actual research -- took this as raised middle finger to their presence in Canadian journalism. I'm not going to bother going over the he-said/she-said of it all; my view is that this comment of Glen's is entirely critical of journalists, not academics, and is less about telling professors to stay out of journalism than it is about telling reporters to stop relying on professors to pad out their stories and launder their political views. But like most serious misunderstandings, this one does a useful job of shedding some light on the relationship between journalism and academic work, and how technology-driven shifts in our conception of status, influence, and research itself called that relationship into question.

II.

The key thing to understand about journalists is that they are the lowest rank of intellectuals. That is to say: they are members of the intellectual class, but in the status hierarchy of intellectuals, journalists are at the bottom. That is why journalists have traditionally adopted the status cues of the working-class: the drinking and the swearing, the anti-establishment values, and the commitment to the non-professionalization of journalism.

The key thing to understand about academics is that they are the highest rank of intellectuals. That is why they have traditionally adopted the status symbols of the 19th century British leisured class -- the tweeds and the sherry and the learning of obscure languages -- while shunning the sorts of things that are necessary for people for whom status is something to be fought for through interaction with the normal members of society (e.g. proper clothing, minimal standards of hygiene, basic manners.)

Despite inhabiting opposite ends of the intellectual status hierarchy, some journalists always saw some appeal in looking up towards academia (instead of down on the working classes) and some academics saw the appeal of journalism. Professors, after all, have the cachet of smarts. Journalists, on the other hand, can become folk heroes. And so within journalism there was a natural alliance to be found between journalists who wanted to give their stories some intellectual heft by quoting a serious researcher on the story at hand, and researchers who wanted an audience for their ideas beyond the faculty lounge and the conference circuit.

So far so good. In the pre-internet world of publishing, journalism served as a useful instrument for brokering academic research to the masses. Academic publishing is slow and research is hard to grasp even for PhDs, while a newspaper comes out every day and the language of the broadsheet is educated but relatively straightforward. The reporter who could become an "instant expert" in a difficult field of research, or the researcher who had a gift for explaining difficult research in straightforward language, played a valuable role in the realm of public debate.

There is a downside to this though. Journalists work under tight deadlines, and -- like everyone else on Earth -- they will take the easy path over the difficult, when given the choice. Meanwhile, it is tough for the lay reporter to know which experts are the ones to trust, and even then, academics can be difficult to reach (the better ones always seem to be on research leave somewhere other than at their home university.) And so there has always been an interest amongst journalists in academics who are easy to reach and are willing to talk about a very broad range of topics, including those outside their areas of research expertise. This -- and I think this alone -- is the combination of lazy journalism and dial-a-quote academic punditry that Glen McGregor suggests we can do without.

III.

It is hard to see how any journalist, or any academic, could object to this. No serious journalist wants to be seen as lazy, and no serious academic wants to be considered a lightweight. So why, then, did so many people take offense at McGregor's proposal?

I think the problem stems from the shifting place of academics in the popular discussion over the past decade. One of the great benefits of the rise of Web 2.0 was the way blogs gave professors a platform, independent of both mass media and niche publishing, to promote their work and to critically discuss the work of their peers in a forum that was free, public, dynamic, and immediate. And while it had the effect of making it easier for journalists to identify and reach useful sources, the more serious consequence (for journalists) was that it threatened to make them obsolete, by eliminating their role as intellectual middlemen.

The rise of the social web, Facebook and most especially Twitter, has only accelerated this process. The 2011 federal election in Canada was widely referred to as the first "Twitter election," but as I wrote in a blogpost for Canadian Business magazine, it was more accurate to call it the first "economists' election." It was the first election in which a large number of Canadian economists made direct, unmediated, real-time interventions into the debates over policy and the various party platforms.

IV.

My suspicion is that many professors interpreted Glen McGregor's manifesto as an attempt at pushing them out of this newly-carved niche in our popular debate. Nothing could be further from the truth. Yet as it progresses, this disintermediation of academic expertise will have a profound impact on how politics and public policy gets debated in this country. It should also have a profound impact on how both journalists and academics do their jobs.

For journalists, it should change their approach to political reporting pretty much along the lines suggested by McGregor. Thanks to technology, journalists no longer have to play the role of ideas broker between academia and the public. At the same time, there is very little status to be gained by quoting the same stale academic sources in story after story, when more insight can be found coursing through a well-cultivated twitter stream. Finally, it means that reporters should stop trying to launder their political biases through a convenient academic who will say the things the reporter wants to say, but can't, given the conventions of unbiased reporting.

But it should also change the way academics work as well. One of the more poorly-kept secrets of the academic world is that humanities professors and social scientists are the most ideologically committed members of society. People like to complain about journalistic bias, but journalists are in fact far less politically biased than most professors. A great deal of what passes as academic political commentary is little more than partisan opinion-mongering (I reviewed a particularly egregious example for the LRC a few years ago). And so if academics are smart, they'll take Glen McGregor's no-academics pledge as a challenge: to offer comment to a reporter only when their research puts them in a unique position to inform or clarify the public debate, and serves the needs of the story the reporter is trying to tell.

If there is a big takeaway from "McDogme95" (as Stephen Maher calls it) it is this: It is an opportunity for political journalists to retrench and concentrate their energies on what they are best positioned and best qualified to do: work sources, file ATIP requests, comb through public databases, and break stories that are in the public interest. That in turn creates a space for academics to insert themselves directly into the conversation through their own devices (Twitter, blogs, etc), or through more traditional means such as op-eds or essays. (I can't think of a better example of this than Peter Loewen's recent essay for the Citizen looking at what Stephen Harper is up to.)

Canadian politics is in need of both better reporting and better contributions by academics. Glen McGregor's manifesto is an excellent first step at articulating the proper division of labour that will take us in that direction.

Gun violence: the economics of abolition

2012-12-19T18:34:33Z

There's lots of talk about America needing to step up on gun control. I suspect that for a lot of people, this is a disguised way of talk about abolition -- that is, the elimination of the private ownership of guns of any sort.

If so, that's fine. It is certainly worth putting that option on the table and airing it. I doubt it would go anywhere, not in Canada, and not in the USA. But imagine for the sake of argument a government passed a bill outlawing private ownership of guns: it would still be faced with the problem that there are a lot of guns in the country. Stats I've seen vary, with estimates between 250 million and 310 million private weapons on the USA.

If you wanted to take these off the street through a buyback, what would it cost? Again, buyback programs vary. $200 for a handgun is common, with some programs offering as low as $20 for a rifle. Some programs I've seen have offered $100 gift cards to places like Target. But these are voluntary buybacks, taken advantage of by people who either want to go clean, or have guns they no longer want. A forced buyback program would be far more expensive.

Assume you wanted to take 280 million guns off the street, at an average buyback price of $200. Total cost would be $56 billion dollars. (That's probably low, but it's a ballpark).

Would it be worth it?

[Note: I fixed the math in the next graph thanks to Andrew Coyne's heads up]

Last year in the US, there were 11500 homicides caused by guns. The actuarial value of a human life is $7.4 million. Multiply that, and you have a savings of $85.1 billion, in one year. 85.1-56 is a net savings, minus the buyback costs, is 29.1 billion, call it $30 billion in savings in the first year. But that's not a one-off -- that's $85.1 billion a year after that, every year, compounded. (I think. I forget how to calculate these sorts of things).

There would be other benefits: lots of people are wounded by guns, so their health care costs and associated other costs would be eliminated as well. But there would be costs as well: it would be foolish to suppose that private gun ownership is a 100% deadweight loss to the economy.

At any rate, the upshot is that the American government could, if it wanted, easily afford to pay for gun abolition, and it would more than pay for itself in about 8 months.

Politics: The Naïve and Cynical

2012-12-19T02:08:44Z

A) TWO VIEWS OF POLITICS

1. Here is a naïve view of how politics works.

Politics is about policy. Groups of like-minded people coalesce around a set of ideas about how the world should work. This group is called a party. The party puts forth a platform of policies that will put those ideas into action. The role of the party then is to serve as the interface, or point of friction, where ideas become policies. To gain power, the party promotes and sells these policies to the public as better than those of their opponents.

Thus, the adversarial nature of politics is essentially a debate between objectively superior policies. An election campaign is when the marketplace of ideas is open for business. It is like a graduate seminar in philosophy, where ideas are freely debated, the principle of charity is in full operation, and the best ideas win, whatever their source.

The goal of this public debate is truth: Truth regarding the demands of justice, the requirements of redistribution, and the scope and character of the public goods that state should offer. The more people have input into the process, the closer we will be to the truth.

When the party with the best ideas wins, and the better policies are thereby implemented, the country as a whole is better off. As John Stuart Mill taught us, truth is both partial and non-rival -- that is, everyone can share in the truth without it being minimised or depleted.

The crucial trait of a successful politician is that he or she be intelligent. Political leaders should be smart people. Better: they should be policy wonks, charismatic academics, philosopher kings who will rule in the better interest of all. The model naïve politician is someone like Pierre Trudeau, or Jack Layton.

2. Here is a cynical view of how politics works.

Politics has nothing to do with policy, it is about power. Joining a political party is not like joining a faculty club, and is more like joining a tribe or a gang. Their overriding function is to gain power and relative status for their group at the expense of people of other tribes and gangs.

Therefore, a party platform is not a list of policies seen as being in the objective interest of the country. Rather, it is a statement of brand affiliation, or, more simply, identity. The function of the party is to sell its brand or identity as more appealing than that of their opponents. Policies are implemented because of how they appeal to the group and buttress its identity.

Elections are basically popularity contests, not much different from the process of voting for class presidents (read Robin Hanson on this point.) So the point of an election is to make one tribe’s leader seem more appealing than that of the other tribe. The ultimate goal of the exercise is to win power for one tribe. If that requires demonizing the other parties as bad patriots, or bad people, so be it.

For cynics, to govern is to choose between competing interests. There will be winners and losers, with some groups inevitably rising and dropping in status. This is because power is indivisible and rival. One group can only hold it at the expense of others.

The best politicians are charismatic figures, or gang leaders. They are polarizing figures, ruthless at pursuing the interests of their tribe at the expense of others. Loved, or at least greatly admired by their followers, they are loathed by their opponents.

The successful cynical politician is not necessarily intelligent. What matters is that he is authentic. The relevant question is not “does he have good ideas” but rather “is he a proper representative of my tribe?” The model cynical politicians are men like Jean Chrétien, or George W. Bush.

B) A FEW COMMENTS

As used here, the terms "naïve" and "cynical" are not intended invidiously. Instead, they are intended to describe the two extremes of a continuum. Different countries might have different political cultures: some might tend to be more naïve in practice, while others might be more cynical. Citizens of different countries might prefer to be at different points on the spectrum. Some institutions might be more conducive to one form over another.

Yet there is an obvious normative quality to this continuum. Not only can it be used to describe how politics does work, it can also be used as a language in support of reform (or in support of the status quo): we may think that politics ought to be more cynical, or ought to be more naïve.

In fact, the most significant political divide in Canada, and perhaps other polities, is not between left and right, but between those who are cynical and those who are naïve about politics. It informs almost all other opinions about how our political machinery -- including Parliament, the courts, the party system, the electoral system, the media -- should function.

Some examples:

The naïve will be in favour of coalition or minority governments and proportional representation. The cynical will prefer majority governments and first past the post.
The naïve will have faith in a deliberative approach to democracy. The cynical will rest content with more Schumpeterian forms.
The naïve will desire more power for individual MPs or representatives, calling for more free votes in particular. The cynic sees the party as paramount, with party discipline the basis of all political engagement.
The naïve will curse the growing reliance on negative advertising as antithetical to the truth-seeking essence of politics. The cynical will see such framing, and the resulting culture of "truthiness," as useful to the in-group/out-group definition that is at the core of political engagement.

Most arguments between pundits and academics consist of disguised disagreements over which mode of politics is better, the naïve or the cynical. Indeed, most apparently partisan disagreements are, if you scratch the surface, differences of opinion between cynics and naïfs.

To decide whether one is cynical or naïve is the most important meta-political decision one has to make. It is unfortunate that we spend so much time arguing about our partisan biases, and pay so little attention to our meta-political commitments. Whether that itself suggests that we are all, deep down, cynics (or perhaps meta-cynics) is an important question.

Why the truth squads can't beat truthiness

2012-11-14T05:37:33Z

My latest column for the Citizen looks at the entirely salutory development, during the last U.S. election cycle, of media getting back to their old role as fact-checkers. The problem, though, is that fact checking is only effective when truth is seen as a necessary element of political success.

In the age of truthiness, the "problem with the effort to truth-squad our way back to fact-based politics is it misunderstands the way political persuasion works. Successful politicians don’t win over the electorate by giving them a set of plausible facts that in turn motivate a set of policies, they sell them on an attractive narrative. The best politicians, from Reagan to Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, are storytellers."

Link

There is no Muslim Tide

2012-11-03T17:14:21Z

This isn’t to say that there aren’t problems with Muslim immigrant populations in parts of Europe, especially France, Germany and Holland. But in every case, the troubles can be traced to one of three causes: fallout from past colonial relationships; domestic policies that hinder the ability of immigrants to work, to worship and to naturalize; or the particular character of the immigrant community and how it interacts with the host country. So, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis in London are not the same as North Africans in Paris or Somalis in Ottawa. But regardless of how these isolated problems are (or are not) resolved, the key point is that they have virtually nothing to do with a grand Islamic takeover project.

That's from my review of Doug Saunders' new book, The Myth of the Muslim Tide.

Is Mormonism crazier than other religions?

2012-11-01T18:12:33Z

(The planet Kobol, as imagined on Battlestar Galactica)

Mormons have some pretty wacky ideas. For example, they believe that some of the native peoples of North America were followers of Jesus Christ hundreds of years before he was actually born. Mormon scripture refers to a planet called Kolob that is, or is near, the physical throne of God -- a belief that was the inspiration for the planet "Kobol" in the sci-fi show Battlestar Galactica (the show's creator was a Mormon). Craziest of all: Mormons refuse to consume alcohol, caffeine, or tobacco.

But is Mormonism wackier than other religions? Is all religious belief equally plausible, or implausible? Or, does plausibility fall on a continuum – a line running from the completely absurd to the thoroughly reasonable?

It would seem that as a rule, most of us -- believers and atheists alike -- instinctively seem to accept that there is a continuum. For example, consider the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, who in recent years has made a name for himself as the leader of a new group of aggressive atheists, a group that also includes Sam Harris, the philosopher Daniel Dennett, and the late Christopher Hitchens. Last month, Dawkins went on a long twitter rant accusing Mitt Romney (who in addition to being the Republican nominee for president was also a Mormon bishop) of being a “massively gullible fool.”

The focus of Dawkins’ attack was Romney’s adherence to the teachings of the Book of Mormon, which is the sacred text of the Latter Day Saints religion. While the book was published in 1830 by Joseph Smith, Mormons believe it contains the writings of prophets who lived in North America between 2200 BC and AD 421.

“Bible & Koran genuinely old, written in the language of their time. Book of Mormon written by 19thC charlatan. Romney too stupid to see it,” Dawkins tweeted. When he was challenged by readers who pointed out that president Barack Obama was also a believing Christian, Dawkins responded: “Christianity, even fundamentalist Christianity, is substantially less ridiculous than Mormonism (and Obama, if he is Christian at all, is certainly not fundamentalist),” he explained. “The idea that Jesus visited America is preposterous, and the idea th[at] Adam and Eve did too is even worse (it is at least arguable that Jesus existed).”

Another example: many Canadians will remember when Stockwell Day, an evangelical Christian who believes that the Earth is somewhere between 6000 and 10000 years old, was leader of the Canadian Alliance. During the 2000 federal election, Liberal operator Warren Kinsella mocked Day’s beliefs by brandishing a Barney the purple dinosaur doll on television, claiming "this was the only dinosaur ever to be on Earth with humans."

What makes this interesting is that Kinsella himself is a self-declared practicing Catholic. Yet as
Kinsella's mockery of Day and the glee with which the "Flintstones" theme of his campaign was picked up by the media makes clear, there is a widespread sense that Catholics are less brainlessly
credulous than Young Earth evangelicals.

So the idea would seem to be that the more a religious belief accords with generally accepted scientific views of the world and the universe, the more credible it is. Let’s call this the Kinsella-Dawkins thesis.

According to this thesis, it is one thing to believe in an omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent deity who, a few thousand years ago, impregnated a middle eastern woman named Mary with His only begotten Son, and then sacrificed that Son to atone for all the sins of Mankind (sins which were invented in the first place by said deity.) It is something else entirely to believe that 600 years before his son Jesus was born, that same deity led a people from Jerusalem to the Americas, where they grew and split into a pair of warring factions.

Or again: It is one thing to believe in the central doctrine of Christianity, namely, the literal resurrection of Jesus. It is something far stupider, though, to believe that the Earth is at most 10 000 years old, and that God put dinosaur bones and other artifacts in the historical record to test our faith (as many young-Earthers maintain.)

This thesis definitely has a lot of plausibility. It would help account for our folk hierarchy of belief, which seems to allow for degrees of respectability between childish fears of the supernatural, at one end, and the wisdom of millennia that we find in the more robust religious traditions, especially the monotheistic ones.

But for a committed atheist, the Dawkins-Kinsella thesis concedes too much. What it gives up in the name of superficial plausibility is the underlying principle at the heart of the atheistic worldview. To properly see why this is the case, it's useful to recall something that Dawkins himself wrote in his best book, the primer on evolutionary biology The Blind Watchmaker. As Dawkins points out, what we are trying to explain through religion is exactly how organized complexity came to exist in the universe. The theistic answer is: God created it.

The problem with this answer is that it presupposes exactly what we are trying to explain. Whatever else God may be, he is organized and complex. If we can simply posit organized complexity, then we haven't really explained anything.

That is why evolutionary theory is so unanswerably powerful. Only evolution by natural selection, or some similarly "blind" process, is capable of explaining how organized complexity came from disorganized chaos. Every explanation that relies on a consciousness, a higher power, or any sort of pre-existing organizing principle is simply assuming the problem away.

But if that's the game we're playing, then what difference is there between Catholicism and Mormonism, or Hinduism and Islam? It's all of a piece: an equally adolescent commitment to wishful thinking and to the supernatural. After all, once you have accepted that there are conscious, invisible and unknowable forces at work in the universe, does it really matter how many of them you buy into? If God can resurrect his son for a long weekend, surely he could also arrange things so that a 10000 year-old planet appears to be billions of years older. If there is an omniscient power in the universe, is it less plausible that he lives on a planet a few thousand light years away than that he resides in an unknowable realm where he hears our prayers and grants salvation according to whim?

Arguing over religous belief is like playing tennis without a net: almost any hit counts as good return. Under these circumstances, it is pointless to debate the question of who is the better player. The only
issue is why anyone finds it useful to play at all.

The past is the future of paid content

2012-10-29T11:53:58Z

With the news that pretty much every newspaper in Canada is going to some sort of pay wall/"metered model," debate is raging once again over whether consumers will ever pay for content. They have and they will. The trick, as someone from the recording business taught me long ago, was to make it seem free, without actually being free. The model is radio. Here's a column I wrote nearly five years ago on the subject. My belief in the soundness of the central argument hasn't changed.

***

Maclean's

Mon Feb 25 2008
Page: 14
Byline: ANDREW POTTER
Column: OPINION

The lengths to which some people will go to avoid picking up the cheque. At the end of January, a 28-year-old Brit named Mark Boyle began what promises to be a 30-month trek from England to India, for which he is bringing some T-shirts, bandages, and an extra pair of sandals. Significantly, he is leaving his wallet behind, hoping to survive entirely off the kindness of strangers.

Mr. Boyle is walking to promote the values of the "freeconomy" movement, a group that claims 3,000 members in 54 countries. Advancing the bold and original thesis that money is the root of all alienation, freeconomicists believe we need to shift from a "money-based, community-less society" to a "community-based, moneyless society." And so Mark Boyle will strike a blow for community by spending the next 2 1/2 years cadging free meals from Bristol to Porbandar.

It comes as no great surprise then that Boyle is a former dot-com businessman. It is cyberculture, and its confluence with hippie values, that is helping drive the copyright wars, one of the most pointless economic conflicts in recent memory. Dedicated to the proposition that "information wants to be free," the Free Culture movement believes content such as news, books, film, games, but above all music, should be free in two senses: free as in speech (there should be no censorship or control over how culture is used); and free as in beer (the culture should be free for the taking).

This movement is opposed by music producers, film studios, and other content producers, who are lobbying for more stringent penalties for illegal downloading and for stricter controls on how content can be used and copied. Here in Canada, the Conservative government is preparing to introduce an updated copyright bill, but it is facing stiff resistance from "copyleft" activists who worry that the new legislation will give in to Big Copyright's most outrageous demands.

And so the two sides are locked in an increasingly polarized dance, with each advocating a perverse and unsustainable business model. It was left to Paul McGuinness, the long-time manager of U2, to try to knock some sense into them. At a conference in France last week, McGuinness gave a speech in which he blamed internet service providers (ISPs), fund managers, and the hippie culture of Silicon Valley for destroying the recording industry, and he went on to propose that a fee for legitimate downloading should be collected by ISPs and paid out to copyright holders.

For his efforts, McGuinness was flogged around the blogosphere, where he was variously accused of being greedy, hypocritical and -- worst -- "corporate." Except that he's right about the influence of hippie values on Internet culture, as well as his suggestion for how to bring the copyright wars to an end.

The profound influence of the counterculture on cyberculture is not remotely controversial. Scratch a file-sharing activist and, more often than not, you'll find someone who deep down just doesn't like the idea of paying for music.

But that is a bit of a cheap shot. After all, nobody likes paying for music, any more than they like paying for food or drink or shelter or anything else. People pay for things when there is stuff they want and shelling out is better than the alternatives of stealing it or going without. All the Internet has done is make theft the most palatable option of the three, while a halfway measure such as 99-cent downloads on iTunes only serves to foreground the main question, namely, why should you pay for something that other people are getting for free?

If you're trying to square the notion of free culture with how the economy works, a handy rule of thumb is this: in the end, the consumer pays for everything. So when it comes to seemingly free media like radio and television, they are funded for the most part by commercial advertising, which is in turn paid for at the cash register by consumers.

The trick to resolving the copyright wars once and for all is to come up with a scheme for making downloading a similar experience to listening to the radio or watching TV: it would seem free, while ensuring that copyright holders actually get paid.

So how can we make file sharing seem free without it actually being free? Canada currently has a levy on blank recording media (such as CDs) that is collected by the Copyright Board and passed on to copyright holders, but a plan to extend the levy to MP3 players was struck down in early January by the Federal Court of Appeal. The most promising idea is a version of McGuinness's tax-and-distribute model, in which the government charges a basic Internet access tax, collected by ISPs, that would give users an unlimited right to download songs, videos, books, games, and so on. The fee would then be paid out in royalties by the Copyright Board in much the same way it is currently done for radio.

Most importantly, it would allow artists to be paid, in a way that doesn't rely on draconian copyright controls on the one hand, or the kindness of strangers on the other. In the end, you get the culture you pay for, which is why the motto that everyone involved should be rallying around is "Free Lunch." As in, there's no such thing as a.

"the incoherent bleating of the Wasposphere elites"

2012-09-13T02:25:00Z

Terry Glavin is a friend and a comrade, and man alive I hope it stays that way. If I ever find myself on his bad side, I hope he is a good long hike from the nearest computer.

Terry took a summer break from columnizing for the Ottawa Citizen, but he's back today, weighing in the hand-wringing over the closing of the Canadian embassy in Tehran and the expulsion of Iran's diplomats from Ottawa. His big target is Ottawa Centre MP Paul Dewar, who lamented the absence of more "robust diplomacy." After giving a short laundry list of the sorts of things Iran's fellow travelers get up to:

It is by these instructive evidences that “robust diplomacy” betrays itself as something worse than mere war. It’s cannibalism with table manners, and nobody has any business calling themselves a socialist, a liberal, a progressive or a social democrat if they engage in anything of the kind.