What is wrong with isms?

In one famous scene of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the titular hero remarks to the audience,

[My history test is] on European socialism. I mean, really. What’s the point? I’m not European. I don’t plan to be European. So, who gives a shit if they’re socialists? They could be fascist anarchists and it still wouldn’t change the fact that I don’t own a car. Not that I condone fascism. Or any “isms”. “Isms”, in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an “ism”. He should believe in himself. John Lennon said it on his first solo album. “I don’t believe in Beatles, I just believe in me.” A good point there. After all, he was the Walrus.

Bueller, the ostensible epitome of libertine individualism for the materialist eighties, gracefully sweeps aside all ideologies -isms- as being distant, impractical, and destructive to the dignity of an individual’s ego.

Twenty years later, South Park echoes very nearly the same point. In one especially far-fetched episode, the character Cartman freezes himself to skip the following weeks because he cannot wait until the Nintendo Wii comes out. Unfortunately, he doesn’t awake for another thousand years, during which Earth is embroiled in a civil war – between different factions of atheists. The atheists fundamentally agree with each other. but are fighting the war over what the name of the atheist organization should be. Through a series of convoluted and equally far-fetched situations, Cartman eventually changes the past from his place in the future, keeping the world from becoming universally atheist.

Cartman:      Wait… Isn’t… everybody at war over atheism?
Shvek:     Atheism? No. We’ve learned to get rid of all the isms in our time.
Medic:     Yes. Long ago we realized isms are great for those who are rational, but in the hands of irrational people, isms always lead to violence.
Cartman:     So there is no war now in the future.
Blavius:     Of course there’s war. The stupid French-Chinese think they have a right to Hawaii.
All:     Yeah!

The events of the episode can best be seen as a criticism of Richard Dawkins (who is featured and satired extensively during the show) and Christopher Hitchens. Coming from very different directions, Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist, and Hitchens, a political pundit, independently published two similar books shortly before the episode aired (namely, The God Delusion and God is not Great, respectively). Part of their theses is that war and irrationality is an inevitable result of any form of theism, and that atheism will bring an end to so many of our troubles. South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker retort that the problem lies not in the specific doctrine of any form of theology, but rather in the very concept of an “ism” itself. People are irrational and their irrationality is amplified when arbitrary, rhetorical lines, such as “atheist”, “agnostic”, and “theistic”, are superimposed over them. Just as “Christendom” Europe fell into an unending war between Catholics, Anglicans, Lutherans, and Calvinists in the early modern era, any unified atheism will eventually deteriorate into an equally irrational insurrection between rival atheists.

Bueller’s off-quoted observation and the anti-ism sentiment of Stone and Parker dovetail to form a very specific brand of anti-intellectual populism (which of course, is an ism itself). Each human is indescribable on a very base level. If people consciously accept any particular ism, they stop thinking for themselves and lose part of themselves. Socialism, atheism, capitalism, and theism are arbitrary constructs dreamed up by academics unconcerned with the practical concerns of the everyday lives of individuals. This position has perhaps not been articulated rigorously, but it has a certain common-sensical appeal.

However, contrast this with the collectivist-historicist schools of the nineteenth century to see just how great of a departure such a paradigm is from the mainstream thinking of not so long ago. According to thinkers such as Hegel and Tolstoy, the events of the history, led by isms, determine the choices of individuals. Attempting to escape from the grand scheme of history is pointless, as whatever occurs in one’s life is brought about solely by forces outside one’s control. Even a reasoned desire to escape from or remain ignorant of isms can be construed as an inevitable historical movement itself. Above, I mention that I believe it to be best understood as a form of populism and individualism. If anti-ism becomes a more complete source of thought, there is nothing keeping us from giving it a real name.

With the historical radicalism of rejecting the ascription to any ism in mind, consider what isms are more literally. Merely, they are words and a method of categorizing people and ideas. Ultimately, any legitimate criticism of isms must be a criticism of categorization. If we categorize everyone by two sets of political beliefs, Conservativism and Liberalism (as defined in the US), we lose a tremendous amount of information. Yet, don’t we gain more in this perverse oversimplification than if we had done nothing at all? Neoconservatives, the religious right, and paleoconservatives all share strands of similar political beliefs, however strained the relationship between the groups may be this moment. In categorizing, we give ourselves the ability to communicate abstract ideas rapidly without the need to lay out every political opinion one has. To say that one is a conservative is to say that one is probably against abortion, probably in favor of the War in Iraq, probably in favor of smaller government, and so on. If we open our vocabularies beyond such a false verbal dichotomy to our full range of named isms, we only are all the better able to quickly communicate our complete array of political preferences. Isms are the vehicle allowing us to do that.

All of this on a certain level is completely banal, but it must be said. To say that you don’t believe in an ism and that you only believe in yourself sidesteps what the ism actually is. An ism is not a set of sworn precepts to which one must adhere. It is merely a signpost pointed roughly in one’s political direction. Refusing to use signposts because they are not a perfect representation of who you are is nonsense. Socialism, fascism, and anarchism will not get Ferris his car, but they are useful for understanding history.

In the jargon I just used a second ago, South Park creators Stone and Park argue that isms cause people to swarm around sets of core beliefs and become irrationally fanatical about them. For example, the existence of the Republican and Democratic parties in America in effect arguably pushes their members towards the party lines and causes them to hate the other party all the more. The factual validity of this is mixed.  Compare such a generalization to religious history. On the one hand, the Catholic Church once required strict adherence to its dogmas with the very real threat of excommunication and interdiction… only to have its powered neutered by the continuous splinter groups who first disagreed on specific issues and later were demarcated with an ism (Lutheranism, Calvinism, etc) representing those beliefs. Again, for example, it is strange to view the ism in Lutheranism as what caused the German nobles to revolt against the Holy Roman Empire when the word “Lutheranism” scarcely existed, even as they used Luther as a pretext. Collectively, they radicalized, but the root of that has been established historically as the nobles’ desire to decentralize authority, rather than their consciousness as a separate group known as Lutherans.

In general, religions and political parties are far more plural than the ilk of Stone and Park give them credit for. History, especially recent history, is only oversimplified by thinking in terms of “Christians attacked Muslims in Holy Land; Muslims eventually won”, or “Muslims attacked Christian/Atheist West; West retaliated”. The Muslim community is diverse in its opinion and tolerance of the West, from the fully acculturated to those living peacefully in Turkey to some burning American Flags. Even the arguably most dogmatic of the Christian sects, Catholicism, has a broad array of theological view points, from the ultra-conservative curia or the liberation theology socialists. The lushness of such dissent in both groups greatly undermines the notion that the creation of the ism caused the sins of their members. We would expect singlemindedness, not schism.

While a certain validity remains in the idea that collectivizing individuals causes chaos, a “mob mentality” does not inevitably develop in every ideology. Any number of factors at any particular time in history determine whether that will take place. Bigotry has been the status quo for much of world history, but for that bigotry has only spordically coalesced  into widespread virulent fanaticism. That is to say, hatred and insularity is widespread around the world, but genocide is not. It takes an extreme set of circumstances to get us from mistrust and prejudice to the Holocaust, Bosnia, or Sudan. No evidence is offered as to how isms gets a society over that “hump” from prejudice to genocide. If you wish to blame isms on prejudice itself, that is again impeached by history, where isms have nearly always existed merely to represent pre-existing differences in religious practice, political opinion, or what have you. The history of the very concept of nationality, the most basic “ism” of all, demonstrates this most emphatically; we have always been fearful of those different from ourselves, even before we had a name for those who are different.

Categorization and generalization are essential communicative cornerstones without which our basic abiliy to think inductively is destroyed. While I focused on the pop culture examples of Ferris Bueller and South Park, similar arguments have appeared elsewhere. Specifically, the well-recieved 2005 film, Kingdom of Heaven, portrayed a very analogous message. Former New York Times journalist Chris Hedges wrote the semi-popular I Don’t Believe in Atheists, which provided many strangely parallels to South Park (it was published after the episode aired, in case you jumped to the conclusion that South Park simply transplanted Hedges’ ideas).  This fear of isms has ingrained itself on certain aspects of our culture, but the fear is unfounded. While we should by no means pigeonhole ourselves where unnecessary or uncritically follow any ism with which we generally agree, our ability to discuss any abstract matter intelligently is severely impaired if we renounce isms altogether.

The Problem with Kitsch

Video game “purists”, many of whom have now passed forty, insist on a Golden Age of arcade games that took place in the late seventies and early eighties. During this era, young companies bombarded young fans with hit after hit, from Centipede to Asteroids to Defender to Donkey Kong. As games becomes more complex, the old guard aged and ended their interest in later hits like Zelda and Sonic the Hedgehog. I have gradually slipped away from playing new games myself after devoting my early teen years to eagerly awaiting the next big thing. At twenty-two, Mario Kart 64 holds my interest more effectively than anything else that has come out lately.

On the one hand, this is natural. I have better ways to spend my money and free time than I did when I was 13. On the other are those who insist that “retro” games, which tends to mean whatever games came out when they were between the ages of eight and fourteen, are the best games in the history of the world. Still there are other who were born five years after Joust was published and play it on an emulator and will mention that fact whenever given the opportunity.

This is bizarre and peculair. Consider what differentiates “classic” or “retro” from contemporary ones. Technology. “Retro” games have poorer graphics, sound, controls, and pretty much everything you could measure objectively. Now, while many of these games may possess excellent gameplay or other je ne sais quois, no evidence is offered to suggest that they, as a rule, monopolize such subjective factors. Nothing, beyond such non-sequiturs as “they’re too complicated” (so was Donkey Kong compared to Pong) or “they’re commercial” (it was always about the money if you read the history), are offered to dispute that. Even if one assumes that such qualitative, subjective factors have not improved in twenty years -an awkward assumption given the improvements everywhere else- new games are still better. The consumer can pick the subjectively superior ones AND get graphics improved by twenty-five years of development. Any presumption that “retro” games are somehow better than contemporary games for reasons outside of nostalgia is completely false.

While this is a subject I’m far less familiar with, I believe the same carries over with film. Dated comedies are no longer funny because they are dated. Dramas from the fifties are painful to watch due to ancient cinematography and wooden actresses with unnatural, high-felutant accents. Watching them is something for academics or professionals do, not something to watch casually and enjoy.

I say this because people do choose retro games and classic movies over their contemporaries, and consciously, for reasons besides nostalgia. They do so while knowing the graphics or acting sucks, but think that it adds to the “charm” or makes it more “genuine”. This is what I mean by kitsch. Many have the need to choose entertainment that is objectively worse so that they can feel better.

“Hipster irony” is an analogous concept to this particular to a certain subculture with society. “Hipster” males might wear, say, ugly, thick rimmed glasses and an overly-tight fitting sweater. They then feel superior to people who wear proper clothing because they are self-aware of how ridiculous they look. This brand of style and sensibility has been satirized to death pretty effectively at the now-famous blog, Stuff White People Like. Its author points out the ludicrous motivations of “white people” (hipsters) who drive the Toyota Prius, eat organic foods, get arts degrees, and identify with the movie Juno. Some of their environmental concerns may be valid, but the overriding theme of their choices is to appear superior by consciously choosing poor options “ironically”. In a speech at google, the author says,

What [Stuff White People Like really is] about is that “white people” is more of a class than a race thing [...], a different generation of people who still have the same desire for status and competition among neighbors, but unlike in the past when that status was determined by material wealth like the size of your house or the size of your diamond ring, it’s been replaced by “authenticity”, [and] environmental awareness, [...]. It’s about this sort of shift [all the while] we are still as competitive as ever.

To that I add, when choosing environmentalism or indie rock or classic movies or retro video games for reasons of aesthetics rather than substance, there is something wrong. It is especially difficult to pull apart what is what or which choice is genuine since, well, “white people” (or movie aficionados or retro gamers) get very defensive if questioned.

Really -and any entry from Stuff White People Like argues it better in any one of its entries than I can by essay- choosing genuine or environmentally conscious options really boils down to feeling superior. Going to farmers markets or jumping headfirst into another culture is more ostentatious than effective by any measure for those goals. I’m not overstating or misrepresenting these attitudes; for example, there is literally a raw foods restaurant with a sign outside that says “conscious food for conscious people”. All too often (while not always) the end goal of purposely putting annoying restrictions on one’s self, whether that be spending a lot of money on a Toyota Prius, not eating cooked food, or only playing video games with pixels the size of my fist is too congratulate one’s self for doing so.

But still, let’s be honest here.

When I first read Stuff White People Like, I thought it was amazing. It perfectly described the irrational aesthetics of my friends, acquaintances, and coworkers. Certain entries, like Arrested Development, The Daily Show/Cobert Report, and traveling, especially resonated with me. Some of my friends went through the list and counted all the entries that defined them- many. I went through the list and counted all the entries that defined me- few. I liked this fact.

It took me a few weeks to grow sick over the fact that I like that I’m not a “white person”.

Choosing kitsch for the sake of kitsch, whether that is playing thirty year old video games or going to farmers markets, is wrong because it is dependent on feeling unique and superior to others. By acting counter-culture to the counter-culture movements of kitsch, I was doing the same exact thing. Even now, I question my awareness of that as further evidence of trying to trick myself into feeling superior. I really don’t know; is my repulsion to traveling and The Colbert Report out of my objective opinion or only to feel superior to kitsch? Conversely, do I only try to form “objective opinions” so that I can feel superior?

These are the types of realizations that make me want to throw up. Please join me in my bulimia.

And again, I cannot separate in my mind whether that invitation is true or a way to feel superior to the reader.

Self-Interest

Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand is an effective metaphor in describing how selfish individuals benefit society within the free market. In seeking profit (though not in seeking rent), the entrepreneur pushes costs down for everyone. The selfish entrepreneur gets a bigger piece of economic pie, but in doing so he makes the pie bigger.

This is a cliche, well known by anyone who has spent time studying Classical Economics. The way commentators frequently portray the metaphor, however, causes a great deal of confusion. Smith didn’t want to imply that it is good for entrepreneurs to be selfish. He was saying that, even if you assume the worst in people, profit-seeking behavior is beneficial for everyone. Such selfishness is completely separate from the economic conception of rationality and self-interest.

The difference selfishness and self-interest is very subtle. Selfishness, which is unequivocally not a virtue, provides for one’s own desires alone. In comparison, self-interest provides for one’s values. These values could be feeding the poor, saving the environment, spreading a faith, stopping disease, or any act of concern outside of yourself. They can also be buying a boat. If you do not spend any time or income on anyone but yourself, then yes, such behavior is selfish. Economic theory does not depend on individual actors to be miserly and selfish, but interested in effectively spending their income on the goods, services, and causes they value and in expanding their individual income so that they may continue to do so.

Others have made this delineation elsewhere, but social scientists, moralists, and even some professional economists screw this up. For example, here. Smith, after all, was himself a moralist. A common caricature of a capitalist is an unyielding, power-hungry, cutthroat monster counting his coins for the sake of procuring more coins. Such characterization ignores what many successful entrepreneurs do with their wealth, whose excess allows the possibility of substantial charitable endowments. Of course, there are certain wealthy individuals who do not donate much of anything. Yes, there are selfish rich people out there. That has nothing to do with the morality of self-interest. Whatever our income level, we spend it on what we value most.

The values fueling our individual economic actions, whether that is renting or owning, going to a movie or giving to charity, or visiting family or traveling Europe, are what makes them rational. The choice and the consequences of the choice are born out of the person making the choice. An individual chooses renting an apartment, going to a movie, and visiting family because they are what he values. Hence, they are based on something and thus rational. If another person chooses owning a condo, giving to charity, and traveling Europe, it is equally rational. Questions of whether it is cosmically right to rent, go to a movie, or visit family are completely irrelevant in asking whether they are rational in an economic sense.

Self-interest and rationality are the same concept, viewed from different angles. “Self-interest” defines the heuristic (will this promote what I think is right?) and “rationality” characterizes the decision (was it the same person who made the decision and who lived with the consequences?).  This is what makes a market “rational”. If society allows each individual to decide whether she should buy milk today, the market for milk is rational. Again, it doesn’t matter whether the person had enough milk already, will just let it spoil, or is planning on feeding it to her goldfish. The freedom to pursue her values renders the market rational.

When the government involves itself in the decision-making process, markets are no longer rational. If a town votes to build a bridge, those who voted against it still must pay. If the town then wants to toll the bridge, how much should it toll? If they price it like a monopoly would (which the bridge presumably is), they would be maximizing the revenue for the town, but not maximizing welfare. If they estimate how much it would cost in a perfectly competitive environment, welfare is maximized, but only helps those who can afford to pay the toll. If the price is set as free or otherwise below the average total cost, too many people will use the bridge. Choosing between these options is not simple. If the bridge was privately owned, the decision would have a clear basis. The person who spent the money on the bridge would weigh pure profit maximization against his civic duty. When a simple majority or politicians take the place of individuals, rationality is lost.

It may be possible for government involvement to be desirable, but it will always remain arbitrary. There is rarely a reason why today one value set may win out over another politically. Some may want a bridge to save time and relieve congestion. Others don’t want it because they won’t use it or because they don’t want more cars on the road. Depending on the circumstances, one side may be right from society’s standpoint as a whole, but which direction voters choose in practice could be anything but that. Still, town selectmen may look at the evidence and are unable to conceive of a situation where building the bridge is not a net positive for the public. They must simply keep the true arbitrariness of the action in the back of their minds before freely going forward with the spending.

We no longer expect atheists to give monetarily to churches. Expecting people who don’t prioritize the environment to pay for cleaning it up is analogous. Claims of science aside, spending income on religion is no less rational than spending it on the environment. Cosmically, such spending is ultimately true or untrue, but self-interest motivates either.

The Law for Law Enforcement

Measuring the ideal punishment for a criminal is an arbitrary, subjective task. On the one hand, we want to deter those prone to wanton acts of theft and violence from committing them. On the other, there must both be a sense of the financial cost in imprisoning someone and a sense of mercy. However, if we want to avoid such subjective weighting, public officials could set the cost imposed on a criminal to be equal to the cost imposed on society by the crime.

A rubric that only charges the criminal the hard costs of a crime may be construed as unjustifiable since it implies that the “efficient” level of crime in a perfectly managed society is not zero. If it is determined that the cost of a husband punching his wife is $3,000, he may feel free to do so if it is worth more to him than that punishment. In that approach, the government treats crime as it would an externality; such a legal viewpoint implies a certain level of domestic violence is just, as in the case of pollution. Most moralists would consider that paradigm of public policy absolutely reprehensible, since no one deserves to be attacked in an absolute sense. Society must deter criminals in the strongest terms possible while keeping notions of mercy and cost of punishment in that back of its collective mind. Nonetheless, it remains instructive to keep considerations of what truly is “quantitatively”-I smirk at calling it that due to the vast assumptions that must be made to come to such a number- to bring perspective and cleanse the palette of excessively emotional moralizing.

The utility-maximizing punishment would be,

(pure cost imposed on society by crime + implicit cost of police and judicial system) / (percentage chance perpetrator is successfully prosecuted in similar crimes)

Unless we have special circumstance, it is hardly simple to measure any of these variables. The “model” quickly breaks if we introduce it murder, which in many cases would require society to kill a criminal more than once? What does that constitute? Torturing the perpetrator and later killing him? How long should a murderer be tortured before we kill him if he kills two people? Three? Measuring the costs society should charge the criminal requires a cosmic omniscience and unthinkable knowledge in calculating the value of a life against pain against money against imprisonment.

A special circumstance, where such measurement is almost feasible, is corruption of law enforcement.

We know exactly the societal cost of a cop or prosecutor who manufactures evidence to put someone in prison for 25 years: 25 years in prison. Even if OJ was guilty, the fact that evidence may have been created to frame him should put the officers and detectives behind bars for a very long time, not fourth estate posturing about racism. This should not illicit any catcalls citing the difficult and important job law enforcement has in protecting society; we’re talking strictly about times when an officer or prosecutor has smeared the truth beyond reproach and reasonable doubt. Alan Gell famously was put on death row until it became clear on appeal that law enforcement withheld evidence to secure a conviction. Should those officers and prosecutors be given a slap on the wrist for what is literally attempted murder?

Police officers seemingly feel free to speed and drive aggressively even when they are not en route to an emergency. A flash of the badge has gotten many an officer off from a speeding ticket or DUI. Why do we let this happen, with no more than occasionally remarking, “cops are jerks”? Regardless of whether or not the fine for running a red light (or a yellow one) accurately reflects either the society costs or cosmic truth, the position of a cop puts her in such a situation that the punishment for the failure to similarly adhere to the rules of society must be higher. Non-trivially higher. I propose that the punishment for all traffic violations must be tripled for law enforcement. If a private citizen pays $200, the officer pays $600. If the private citizen loses his license for four months, the officers loses hers for a year. Furthermore, these punishments must be identically levied against any officer who demonstratively turned a blind eye to the crimes of other officers. The societal cost is the same.

For all the ranting performed by the ACLU in the name of the accused, it stands to far more reason to give personal disincentives to the prosecution for doing anything but seeking the truth. Retroactively throwing out evidence in the name of the Constitution only confounds evidence in general. By deterring officers from abusively using their powers through incentives, we accomplish 80% of the effect with 20% of the effort and without needing invoke a newly coined civil right. We shouldn’t care nearly about the rights of the perpetrators as those of the truly falsely accused.

If we transfer this thinking back into the real world where we use the justice system to deter the impedance of rights rather than utility maximization, little has changed. Unreasonably taking away 25 years of someone’s life is just as wrong, if not more wrong, cosmically, as it is from the perspective of general welfare. An officer willfully allowing another officer to drive home at .11 is akin to becoming an accessory to the DUI. Cosmically just punishments are generally next to impossible to ascertain. Moralists and much of society may become disgusted at the notion that a husband should be able to write a check for $3,000 whenever he feels like pushing his wife down a flight of stairs.

Yet, our disgust is purely emotion and non-evidentiary. In comparison, the costs imposed on society by corrupt cops and prosecuters have a clear shape. Their coverups, whether in looking the other way on a DUI or manufacturing evidence, possess a clear lower bound, societal cost. There’s no need for this lower bound to be a hard one; juries and judges may introduce wiggle room when exigent circumstances present themselves. Still, these unmitigated costs imposed by the police and prosecutors upon the unjustly accused or society must form the basis on how society in turn prosecutes them, rather than an oft-ignore footnote of tertiary priority.