It's a Wiki world - Pt. 2

Yesterday we looked at the changes in journalism and the reliability of the press, and used Wikipedia as the new model of distributed intelligence. My point, in part, was that we should not place absolute trust in any source of information: nobody gets it exactly right, and some get it disastrously wrong (or are disastrously wrong-headed).

This understanding also relates to the idea that asymmetrical information -- when one person has more info than the person she is negotiating with -- is in itself a moral hazard. If we want to deal with moral hazards, we don't need to get tough with punishment so much as make sure that everyone has access to the same information.

I find this casts an interesting light on the idea of privacy. If we are all human, what is there to fear from someone else knowing our human-ness? That's meant to be a rhetorical question, but the fact is that some parts of this society know a whole lot more about us than we think they do, or that we know of them. That type of asymmetry can easily be turned into impositions of power that is markedly asymmetric.

It's not so much about privacy as it is about guilt and shame -- we fear that our personal foibles and failings will makes us vulnerable to someone with intimate knowledge of us, especially if that person also has political power. But what if we all know so much about each other that we recalibrate guilt, and separate private human weakness from psychopathic, destructive behavior? What would that do to our astonishing homicide rate?

Small, cohesive social groups, like tribes or villages, are often marked by low levels of violence or crime. It could be argued that one reason for that is that in those cultures everybody knows everybody, information about people is pretty equally shared. The village works by both setting standards of conduct, and by helping identify and deal with personal problems before they are catastrophes.

Very few of us live in that type of village. But some of us are experiencing a heightened sense of personal community as we observe and engage in the conversations that flourish on Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and other social media networks. As a corollary, Wikipedia is an instructive model of how distributed learning creates a process that engages people across a broad spectrum while it also delivers a product of high (if not perfect) reliability.

I have great hope for Wikipedia, and for all the other tools that help us build meaningful social networks. We are just beginning, still learning how to handle these new sources of information, but perhaps this can be a way to share what we learn with a larger and larger part of our planet. I think that may be an unprecedented way to understand the unexpected ways we are, indeed, connected. To my mind, there is no more important lesson to be learned in our lives. Wiki on.

It's a Wiki world - Pt. 1

An article in the current Atlantic looks at the Sotomayor nomination news cycle in terms of demonstrating how "news" content is coming largely from political ideologues who are effective at skimming all those feeds out there in order to isolate the most incendiary moments. The author, Mark Bowden, calls this "post journalism."

The article then repeats the meme that serious journalism -- the pursuit of a story that is focused on understanding context and background and worrying "truth" out of a mess of facts -- is dying, if not dead. As the profession of journalism becomes smaller and smaller, the time spent on news programming is more often filled by uncritical commentary on little splinters of reality. The point is not to find the truth: "No, not the truth: victory, because winning is way more important than being right." And the Internet has a lot to answer for in promoting this type of post-journalism reporting.

That may explain a lot about our current political debate and the tenor of our news media, but just how long has journalism been around in any form? From its beginnings in the 17th and 18th centuries, journalism flourished as a tool of different power groups. Slanted, vitriolic, aggrieved -- the truth had little to do with it. We have been fortunate enough over the last 100 years or so to have, somehow, been blessed with an enlightened practice of journalism that did make, at least some of the time in some places, an effort to find the truth. We can bemoan its passing, but why should we expect anything different, people being what they are?

Which brings me to Wikipedia. The idea of a user-generated encyclopedia struck fear into the hearts of those who believe in experts and objective truth. While I accept that experts are important, there are a lot of "amateur" experts out there who, taken collectively, have a lot to add to our understanding of factual reality. The stories of bogus articles and slanders got a lot of attention, but a recent study showed that Wikipedia is about as accurate as the Encyclopedia Britannica. In other words, even the experts don't get everything right.

The real question concerns how we know whether something is a fact or ... something else. That comes down, I think, to trust. My own rule of thumb is  simple: In matters of truth, trust no one." My second rule of thumb, a corollary if you will, is: "Trust everyone -- to get it wrong."

Every story is incomplete, slanted, infected with an incomplete understanding of which facts count, which ones don't. But all those stories might help you (me) understand what the larger truth is. And as you pay attention to who tells you what, you might be able to trust some people a bit more than others. Which does not relieve you of the obligation to test and verify. And to keep track of those who just don't seem to get anything right about the facts.

Wikipedia is a fantastic tool, but you shouldn't rely on it as your only source, any more than you should rely on the Encyclopedia Britannia as your only source. Wikipedia is here to stay, and it should be. The power of the decentralized and distributed learning, I think, opens the door to views of reality with a less restricted point of view. And I believe that where we are right now with blogger journalism is just an early phase of this development towards a more subtle, varied and variegated understanding or factual truth.

As more of us learn how to participate in the Wiki world -- sharing our knowledge with others in a cooperative and skeptical conversation about our world -- I have great hope that we can all learn important lessons. Especially about trust.
But then, perhaps I'm a little too trusting.

Moral Hazards

One term that keeps popping up in discussions of the finance bailout (e.g., John Stossel a couple of weeks ago and in the WaPo this morning) is "moral hazard". The term has also been referred to in debates about health insurance. But you probably haven't heard a good definition of what the words actually mean.


The term dates back to the 1600s and was widely used in the British insurance industry by the 1800s. Wikipedia defines it as a special case of information asymmetry -- the advantage that goes to a party who has more information than the counterparty being negotiated with. In this sense, the moral hazard arises in that if one has special or inside information he will be tempted to use that information to "game" the transaction. At bottom is probably the idea that he would be a fool not to do so, and so the hazard or asymmetry must be identified and mitigated before the transaction is final.


In the current debate, commentators on the right, like Stossel, are appealing to another sense of "moral," in the sense that it is immoral not to properly punish a bad decision or mismanagement. Just like we make sure a house fire is an accident before putting it out, and lifeguards make sure the swimmer didn't just decide to venture too far out, and ER doctors first decide who's wrong or right before treating a gunshot. Oh, right. That's not the way life works in this modern, western, judeo-christian culture. Correction and improvement is one thing;  punishment is something else entirely.


This is not just abstract, soft-headed charity, agape or eros. We have learned, through many hard lessons, that a neighbor's fire can burn our house, no matter who started it. It used to be that if you hadn't bought insurance from the fire fighters, your house was going to burn, no matter who started it. As a society we decided the price was too high -- to everybody.


In the last few years, there are some individuals, mostly but not entirely on the right, who have argued there is a moral hazard inherent in robust health care insurance -- people will use too much of it. If health care is too cheap, they'll just go running to the doctor for any frivolous reason at all. It doesn't matter that real life doesn't support this psychological tale; it was a textbook example of moral hazard, as defined by health insurers. And it was their argument for making the system difficult and mean: "We are removing the moral hazard for their own moral good. (And our profits.)"


So let us return to the failure and bailout of the financial sector of the economy. It is ironic to me that the system, again largely defined and sold by the right but support by key characters on the left, actually installed moral hazard in the system more than 30 years by assuring information asymmetry in the system itself. The key reason for removing oversight of banks and brokerages was that they -- the finance pros -- knew best, only they had the info to make the best choices and make the market work at its optimal efficiency. Left to these wise men, the market would just take care of itself. And I'm not even talking about quants! (Some other time, perhaps.)


This gospel was largely preached by the so-called Chicago School economists. The neoclassical offspring of von Hayek and Friedman, they believed they understood how to insure efficient markets. They leveraged a uniquely adolescent understanding of the world (Rand-ian objectivism/libertarianism) into an economic theory that valued concise measurements and simple predictive models, predicated on (universal) rational self-interest. They have stood astride the global economy of the last three or four decades convinced of the perfectibility of their models, and look how well it's worked! 


Former Fed chief Paul Greenspan (a youthful acolyte of Ayn Rand's) rode his absolute conviction about the ultimate aim of economy's arrow right to the ground and only expressed mild chagrin that he hadn't -- that the industry hadn't -- foreseen the role of inefficient greed and self-destructive ambition. He still doesn't have his head around that. Who is John Galt, indeed.


When they talk to themselves, the right seems to be pretty comfortable trotting out "moral" issues. But what can be said about the morality of letting others suffer -- in terms of under- and un-employment, inadequate and uneven health care, a growing disparity between wealthy elites and not-quite-making-it proles -- while preaching moral hazard? Even if you don't actually say "Let them eat brioche?"

Our American character

What is it about the "American character" that allows the kind of looney-tunes debate now taking place around our attempts create a rational health care system? 

This debate goes back to the beginnings of modern medicine, which came at a price. The first insurance companies, in the thirties, were more like philanthropic organizations for groups like the Elks. It was the fixed wages of WWII  that made employer-supplied insurance a way for GM and others to attract needed workers. 

President Truman tried to deliver universal health care as a natural extension of Roosevelt's "Four Freedoms," but a resurgent Republican party branded the policy, and him, as "communist." And it certainly helped that once the big employers realized how big that pool of insurance money was, there was no way they were going to give it up.

After decades of health care under this model we have a body of evidence that's pretty hard to ignore -- unless you want to. Consider:

• We are the only industrialized country in the world without a universal public health system (link).
• We pay almost twice as much per capita for the care we do get,
• Spend a much lager percentage of GDP,
• And our life expectancy is towards the bottom of the pack (link)
• Last year, in more that 62% of US bankruptcies, medical bills were the main cause, 
• And most of those people had life insurance (link)

And it's not as if this information is difficult to find. A few minutes with Google will give you hundreds of studies and sources that tell the same story.


Even more confounding, as reported by Robert Creamer,  "a poll conducted for Americans United for Change by the respected firm of Anzelone and Liszt -- completed last Friday -- shows that, by a 62% to 28% margin, likely 2010 voters would be more inclined to support President Obama's healthcare reform plan if it included a public option that gave people a choice between private insurance plans and a public health insurance plan."

An excellent piece in Slate by Timothy Noah, "A Short History of Health Care," makes the observation there is are two realities in this discussion: 

"The trouble with the policy debate that's slowly beginning to emerge as the medical-industrial complex spins out of control is that it pays maximum deference to Reality 2 (political reality) and minimum deference to Reality 1 (the thing itself). "

The take-away is that our legislative system is not, in itself, democratic. Specifically, the Senate's function is to blunt the voice of the people. It was formed to protect the interests of the large land-owners (who were also largely slave owners at the time). In the past few decades the Senate has been also become the guardian of the large corporate interests, and there is almost no corporate interest larger than the alliance of insurers and pharma. The fact is that a relatively small number of Senators can effectively block any action that threatens their corporate allies. Rep. Jim Wilson (a protegee of Strom Thurmond) calls the President a liar and immediately raises a half million dollars (which is about what he received the last few years from insurance companies).

Add to that a few entertainers who see an opportunity to build an audience, and have no compunction to ignore the factual evidence, and you can motivate a few thousand disgruntled (if not exactly unified) partisans to assemble and grab a few minutes in the media spotlight.

The fact is there are many people unhappy with the political process. From the left side of the spectrum we it looks like our modern Know-Nothing, troglodyte party is about to take down the one chance we may have to  create a rational health care system. But it ain't over yet.

For one thing, the American character may not be patient. It may want instant decisions, and not much palaver. We want the 80-yard touchdown play. Every time. But it seems we have a specific character in the White House who is comfortable enough with the reality of the thing as it is that he's willing to outwait the opposition, to stay with a strategy that is realistic about strengths and weaknesses and the critical importance of this opportunity.

It just might be that because of a singular American character, history, and time, is on our side.

Waiting for History

I started this post yesterday, trying to think about the lessons we've learned, but got hung up trying to sort through a number of conflicting thoughts about the whole 9/11 industry, and so put it off. The delay proved (to me, anyway) once again the value of leisurely cogitation. Deadlines are all well and good -- I probably get more accomplished with them than without them -- but sometimes the timely is the enemy of the good (and, pace Ms. Huffington) first thought is not always best thought.


Like many, I can remember precisely where I was when I first heard about the plane hitting the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Just as I can remember clearly where I was when I first heard that JFK had been shot, when I first heard Eleanor Rigby on the radio, when I first saw my future wife, when the Northridge Quake hit.


Each of those was clearly a point in time when I was aware this is a discontinuity, a break in the seemingly seamless narrative of my life. Some moments are shared with others, but the truly profound impacts are always personal.


The fact that I and millions could watch the towers burning, see video of the second impact, and watch in real time as the first, and then the second tower fell, even though I was thousands of miles from New York, created a public moment of almost unprecedented scale.  Out of that public moment came a shared agreement that this changes everything, that now we have learned something important about how the world works.


So, that's what I'm trying to ask myself now: What changed? What have we learned? (And by "we" I mean the political and news elite, largely based in New York and Washington,  who define what passes for conventional wisdom in public discourse.)


We learned who the hijackers were, and how they spent their last days and hours, but did we learn why they chose this course of action? We learned that the bulk were from Saudi Arabia, but did we learn anything about the bizarre alignment of sybaritic sheiks and wrathful Wahhabi priests that share control of the Saudi kingdom? Did we learn anything of the Bush family's three generations of intimate relations with the Saudi royal family and oil interests? Of the festering popular discontent, in Arabia and elsewhere, with the huge role the Saudis (royals and Wahhabi) play in regional politics?


On the other hand, did we learn that the US is not an island, that we share a larger world with other people, other cultures, with many different ideas about personal and cultural ideals? Did we recognize that a nation is not defined simply by its leaders, any more than the US can be solely defined as Republican or Democrat, no matter who's in power?


Did we learn that in order to understand current conditions, we have to allow that unintended outcomes must always be taken into account? That our role in geopolitics, especially post-WWII, makes us the antagonist to many other cultures, that our vaunted power is most easily seen as a threat? That no matter what we think the cause or justification, aggression will be seen as aggression? That it can take decades, or even centuries, for these forces to play out?


And, critically, did we learn from the profoundly human tragedy of September 11, 2001, the tragedy we've been witnessing again the past few days, that individual lives do matter, no matter what the country, the politics, the religion?


When I referred to the 9/11 industry, I was thinking specifically of the common thread in almost everything I saw or heard yesterday on the news, an agreement that somehow what happened at Ground Zero, at the Pentagon, on Flight 93 was all about our tragedy, best displayed in personal terms of our loss. That is powerful, and real, but it is only a first step in learning the lessons we need to learn. 


The Greek playwrights (and their audiences) valued tragedy because it allows people (as a community, as well as individuals) to re-experience that sense of discontinuity, and to start fresh, one more time, to try to get past the ignorance and hubris that contributed to the tragedy in the first place.


I suppose the real lesson is that eight years is too short a time to really assess what we have learned. At the same time, there is no excuse that allows not asking the key questions whenever we can. We just have to be patient, and wait for history's gears and wheels to do their slow, pitiless work. And, while we're waiting, keep pushing for better answers here and now.

Common Sense

For the past several years I have paid close attention to the use of "common sense," especially in political discussions. Most often the term is used by people who would describe themselves as conservative. So how does common sense work to support a conservative viewpoint and criticize a more liberal viewpoint?


Dictionary.com posts this definition of "common sense":

"noun -- sound practical judgment that is independent of specialized knowledge, training, or the like; normal native intelligence."

In other words, common sense is judgment that does not depend on intellectual questioning, but on recognizing what has worked in the past, the conventional wisdom. The sun comes up about the same time day to day, but over weeks or months gets earlier or later depending on the time of year. Cows need to be milked twice a day. A watched pot never boils. Red sky in the morning ... oh, wait, that doesn't really work around here.


Common sense is a way to get through the day without getting hung up in details that will keep from getting done what's gotta be done. It is, simply, a way to keep from thinking too much and acting too little. 


But sometimes you won't be able to solve a more complex and singular problem without delving deeper. In those cases, relying on common sense may, eventually, add to your difficulties, or even bring disaster. Sometimes using common sense results in "Ready, Fire, Aim" types of strategies when the only way to really deal with a problem is to make sure you've got the right target and your aim is true. (I highly recommend Jared Diamond's book "Collapse" as way to think about the limits of common sense on a cultural level.)


For myself, when I hear the term "common sense" I get suspicious. It is the close equivalent of hearing "trust me" from a salesperson: I am being asked to suspend my skepticism and intelligence in order to go along with someone else's program. First question: Who benefits? Trying to discern the answer to that will make common sense thinking all but useless. For one thing, you soon realize that someone else's common sense is rarely exactly the same as yours. Appeals to common sense are too often emotional appeals to blind obedience, more about being negative than actually solving a problem. "Stop asking questions, just do what I say, it's common sense."


In this current political discussion, there are some who are  making appeals to common sense based on connections to the revolutionary pamphlet penned by Tom Paine. If they would read that work they might see that Paine's use of "common" had more to do with using the common language of ordinary people than rejecting the value of rational inquiry. Few people have made a more damning indictment of common sense and conventional wisdom.


"Common Sense" was meant to arouse a political reaction -- it was avowedly provocative in its rejection of the divine right of kings and hereditary wealth and power. It was in effect a direct attack on the prevailing common sense. 


If you're really interested in understanding Tom Paine's attitude towards politics and society you might want to read his later works "The Rights of Man" and "The Age of Reason." These books were unapologetically based on the use of deep, intellectual questioning of the conventional wisdom of the time, and advanced a view of social responsibility that would have 2009 conservatives (justifiably) shouting "socialist." At the time, these works were reviled by many, particularly in Britain, where he was tried in absentia for seditious libel.


In other works Paine also let it be clearly known that he viewed private property as theft from the common inheritance, and slavery as an absolute iniquity. None of these positions made him many friends. When he died there were only six mourners, two of them black freedmen, perhaps because they recognized his basic, and uncommon, humanity.


That Tom Paine should be a hero to our current clique of fear mongers indicates that they know little about the real person or his writings. They want to be revolutionaries without the heavy lifting. Unfortunately, it also indicates how little we know about either common sense or "Common Sense."

Old Habits, Old Fears

According to an article in today's LA Times, President Obama is losing support among a particular group of voters -- those who consider themselves "white." The reason for this drop, according to the article, is Obama's policy stands. Oh, really?

I beg to differ. To anyone who watches TV or reads the news, the dominant voices have not been policy wonks engaged in a rational discussion of specific proposals and likely alternatives. The voices I've heard have been loud, angry, pushed beyond reason. The words generally reflect the chatter coming from Fox and the radio rightocracy, and that chatter has been focused on the "otherness" of Obama. In other words, his blackness.

No matter what issue is raising the right's ire, the argument comes back to "it's bad because it's Obama. You just can't trust him." That's why the health plan must be called "Obamacare," even though the plan is being written in the House, or the current version of the bailout, first cobbled together by Bush apparatchiks, must be called "Obamanomics." It's the frame, and it's all the right seems to have.

It is also racist. And it's working, if the poll released today is accurate, and if you think raising suspicion among white folks about Obama's otherness can be called "working."

Just to be clear, let me provide a brief but workable definition of "racist."

• First of all, I use it to refer to actions and to speech, not to intention (because I really can't know anyone else's intentions, only their actions). 
• Second, a word or action is racist when it ignores the individuality of any person, and judges them as a member of a group, as if every member of the group can be assumed to share those characteristics. 
• The more negatively you view the group, and those characteristics, the more invidious the racist word or deed.

Racism is, then, the denial of human individuality. It does not belong to any one culture or skin color, and there is probably no one who does not sometimes at least use racist language or thoughts. To me, the only thing that matters is how we respond when a racist word or deed is pointed out. This is not about guilt (one of my recurring themes), it is about taking responsibility for being a human being on this planet trying to coexist with other, separate and only partly knowable human beings.

There have been times and places when humans protected their families or villages by shunning the "other," by seeing them as less human than us, easier to reject, to enslave, to eliminate. That is a perfect definition of ignorance. But we live in a world where the interconnectedness between families, villages, nations makes ignorance a liability. We have learned too much about plague, war, and global financial breakdown. It's time to leaves those old habits and fears behind.

Once again, we are talking I suppose about intelligence, and the ongoing responsibility to see the world as it is, to push ourselves beyond our preconceptions and prejudices. I'm trying to do my best, and to make it easier for others to do a little better and realize their best as we glimpse and appreciate the ways we are ALL connected.

Happy Labor Day.

Religion: A Modest Proposal

Critic James Wood, in a recent article in the New Yorker (subscription required to read the entire article), looks at the dispute between "God and the new atheists." With recent books by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris and Christopher Hithchins attacking "the god delusion" there have of course been a number of counter-arguments defendng the power of faith. As there have been for hundreds thousands of years. Nothing new.

In this particular dispute can I ask for one point of linguistic clarity? Can we make a distinction between that which is "spiritual" and that which is "religious"?

To wit: the word religion describes a community of belief much more than it describes the relationship of the individual believer to whatever is held to be holy. There may be one Holy Roman Catholic church, but there are many beliefs about the specific nature of god or Jesus or specific saints or teachings held by the members of that church, no matter what the pope says. Perhaps as many beliefs as there are self-professed catholics.

The article looks at a recent work by the Oxford don Terry Eagleton, who pulls off being both a Marxist and a Catholic. As soon as Wood tries to summarize Eagleton's defense of faith you can see the basic problem.

On the one hand Eagleton recognizes that the god of Aquinas (or Maimonides) is so far distant from the concerns of this planet that he (god) can only be talked about as the sum of all reality, the Thing that Is. This language is indistinguishable from the way that even atheists talk about the universe, or from the descriptions of the Tao or of the operations of sub-atomic particles. That is the Spiritual view, human beings trying to come to grips with the limits of our minds in comprehending the vastness of the exterior world. There may be elements of faith in the spiritual discussion, but it is still grounded in the open-ended process of approaching the numinous in the swirling, random dust of our lives.

It's when Eagleton starts to talk about the specific nature of god and the relationship to our daily lives that he goes to a different level entirely -- that of professed and shared belief whose main value, in the manner of Wittgenstein, is to connect us to the culture around is. That is Religion -- and it has almost nothing to do with spirituality. It may have much to do with social orthodoxy, and obviously has a great deal to do with forging political support and religious armies prepared to do battle with ... whomever.

When we talk about creeds or sects or organizational entities, we are talking about Religion, not about the nature of god or spiritual transcendence. When we try to understand why Life (in every sense) is what it is we have entered Spiritual realms.

For one thing, the individual on a spiritual path is, almost by definition, on an individual path. This has always been a major problem for any church -- keeping firm control of all those shining-eyed mystics who have experienced god for themselves, and don't need to go through a priest. Individual knowledge, then, threatens priest and church, while shared superstition and fear strengthen them.

At pretty much any period in human history (since the rise of cities and government and all that) religion was a kind of counterbalance to kings and earthly power, with dangers to both sides from either too cozy or too hostile a relationship. But both sides gain from subjugating the spiritual individual to the religious/political organization (and promising an afterlife better than this one -- the ultimate retirement benefit).

Somehow, the spiritual has survived, and perhaps you and I can agree (as individuals) to treat religion as Religion and spirituality as Spirituality. That might be a good start.

Losing Control?

A Financial Times article on the redoubtable Glenn Beck, starts with the statement that the White House "lost control of the healthcare debate in August," a meme that reflects the conventional wisdom inside the beltway and repeated by most (but not all) national news pundits.


The article looks to the Glenn Beck phenomenon -- rising viewer numbers as national advertisers separate themselves from his incendiary attack on Obama et al -- as a learning opportunity. But what is learned?


First of all, control is in the mind of the pundit. The corollary is that control, outside the pundit's mind, does not correlate to the loudest voices and heat from a partisan crowd.


Glenn Beck has learned that incendiary language can deliver an audience big enough to provide a substantial income to him. Rush Limbaugh is a role model in this regard. I have a family acquaintance who has been a social friend of Rush's for some years. In social situations his political opinions are well hidden, or far short of his caffeine- and whatever-driven on-air rants. Perhaps Glenn has a private life, as well.


Being a talk show host is a job. If your goal is to build an audience base that delivers revenue, then you're certainly incented to keep pushing the language to keep pushing the audience. And Glenn is just doing his job.


Now, about that audience. After decades of scientific polling, through every vagary of historical upheaval, it is clear that are large groups, on both ends of our political spectrum, who are so identified with that viewpoint that reality that they are not likely to change, no matter what the opposing argument or candidate. However, those groups do not share the same values.


To make a gross but useful generalization, the right is less open to intellectual arguments than the left. Glenn Beck has found that his audience responds to emotional stimuli -- fear, anger, frustration -- and he feeds that emotional rush. But this is not the same as controlling the argument -- unless his audience controls the apparatus of government. And they don't.


Pundits, no less than Glenn, live in the present. "Today is the end of history. Political reality is the only reality. And no one will ever hold me account for what I said yesterday, or last week."


Now, that's control.

Climate and Guilt

As noted, in earlier posts, one of my general themes vis-a-vis politics is taking a close look at the language used and understanding the frame (or meme), in order to get at the "real" message represented by a particular statement -- no matter who the source.

Tracking the discussion on "global warming" is one of those activities that can make you crazy if you only react to the frame. The fact that the LA Times persists in giving Jonah Goldberg a prominent spot on its Op-Ed page has made me a little crazy in the past, but I'm trying to take the time to apply the de-framing exercise to his screeds, and I'm finding there is a lot to learn about Jonah and his fans, whoever they are.

Take today's column, "Maybe it's the sunspots" (it has a different title online). Along with a shallow dip into the science of sunspots and their correlation to warmer or cooler climatic periods, Jonah gets to the meat of his argument in the last third of his column, as he talks about being "lectured and harangued" about his choice of toilet paper or cereal or shopping bags. That's what really cheeses him off -- being made to feel guilty by some snotty environmentista.

Look at what most of the right says about climate change (or global warming, or whatever) and it comes down to an argument about who's at fault, buttressed by how expensive it will be to fix it, even if it is our fault, which it's not. After all, we exhale CO2, how could it be bad for us? Fox News even had their own viewpoint last Friday.

In other words, for those folks who see such issues in terms of a divinely defined moral order, how could we be doing something immoral? Don't tell me I'm guilty! George Lakoff (earlier bog) has an interesting anlaysis of the political identities that see the world in this way.

For those of us whose experience of the world demonstrates that we are responsible for our actions -- and that responsibility is NOT the same as guilt -- we are confronted with this basic disconnect. We accept that we don't know all the answers, but that doesn't mean that we ignore what we do know while we keep asking the questions that will get us closer to the truth, inconvenient or not.

In some future blog we will also look at the role of "common sense" in terms of this disconnect.