Upon common theaters, indeed, the applause of the audience is of more importance to the actors than their own approbation. But upon the stage of life, while conscience claps, let the world hiss! On the contrary, if conscience disapproves, the loudest applauses of the world are of little value.
John Adams in a letter to Charles Cushing, mid-1750s. Quoted in John Adams By David McCullough
We’re 9 months into our life in Texas and here are a few observations.
Life in Texas is good and getting better.
There are two books I’ve been reading this year which kept me from even seriously considering voting for McCain. Both books are about the Bush administration. The books are Fiasco and The Dark Side.
Fiasco is a history of the first year or so of the Iraq War, with a focus on the US military. Over and over, it shows how ineptly the Iraq occupation was planned and executed. I supported the war until some point after the 2004 elections, but that support was based in ignorance. If I had understood that the war could not possibly have possibly been liberating due to the complete incompetence of it, I would not have wanted it. I now doubt that any war could be one of liberation, but I am certain that the Republican party of today can not manage military affairs with any effectiveness.
The Dark Side is the story of what might be called a Bush shadow government, made up of mid-level appointees and bureaucrats, who undercut higher level government officials to create laws, regulations, and processes to increase executive power in particular, and state power in general, in almost every way. They systematically deceived other parts of government, and even other parts of the executive branch, in order to weaken traditional rights and privileges of American citizens and even non-Americans. While Bush campaigned as a conservative, he conserved almost nothing and had his underlings shred the fabric of American government. It’s not entirely clear who should be held responsible for all this (Bush or Cheney or Who Knows?), but one thing is certain: if the Republicans win in 2008, they will draw from the same groups of people to staff a new administration. McCain may diverge from some parts of the GOP, but the republican candidate for president can be only so independent from his party.
In my opinion, McCain would not fix the problems Bush caused. I’m not sure he knows what the problems are and I have a feeling he might not consider them problems at all. McCain seems like a centralizer at heart, a military-style command and control guy. But, at the same time, he also seems to frequently not bother to either command or control his own campaign, with which he frequently publicly disagrees. Which sounds like exactly the same leadership style that resulted in the problems discussed in the two books.
McCain, I think, is not a source of any hope. He would not improve anything as president. Obama, in my opinion, would probably not fix anything either. He would probably worsen many of America’s problems. But, at least Obama would be a slight repudiation of the Bush years, which I think we’ll rue for the rest of our lives.
While the very act of voting presents certain problems for liberty, I voted for Barr this year. I can’t think of any candidate or party for which a vote is a more complete repudiation of Bush. If there is anything that America needs, I think it is to put these last two presidential terms behind us.
I think that opposition to ethical egoism and evolution have at least one feature in common. Both creationism/”intelligent design” and anti-egoists tend to argue without really discussing the actual truth value of the ideas they are opposing. Often, a creationist will argue that belief in evolution will bring with it bad social effects. In fact, there is a vital sub-group of creationists who spend a lot of time trying to tie Hitler to Darwin. That’s hardly a scientific argument against evolution, but it is meant to persuade. Of course, creationism isn’t really any sort of scientific enterprise, and so its indifference to truth is somewhat to be expected.
In the case of egoism, the arguments against it typically try to imagine some sort of scenario where failing to follow non-egoist principles results in some sort of morally disgusting result. This type of argument is fairly common in ethical reasoning, as well as any other field where you’re prefer to not reason from first principles. But it’s a type of arguments that, by its design, fails to even notice that there may be some positive argument for the principle in question. In fact, the argument type I mention really just results in begging the question, as the “morally disgusting result” is typically evaluable as morally disgusting from non-egoist principles. One rarely comes across an anti-egoism argument that actually engages the egoist argument on egoist terms. Anti-egoists, like anti-Darwinian, prefer to stay within their own premises and then show that, by golly, you can’t be both a creationist and a Darwinian, so Darwinism must go (you can’t be both an anti-egoist and an egoist, so egoism must go).
As it turns out, there isn’t a coherent alternative to either neo-darwinism or ethical egoism. Additionally, neither evolution or ethical egoism result in morally disgusting situations. Evolution, so far, results in humanity, among other things. Ethical egoism, as I live it, is full of creativity, co-operation, compassion, and love.
I suppose that if it were true that ethical egoism required me to violently subjugate every person I encountered and that I could only feel true happiness when sunbathing by the side of a river of human blood…well, I would probably reconsider ethical egoism. In this vein, if everyone shit ice cream, then restrooms would be restaurants. But, as things actually stand, ethical egoism has made me a decent person and nobody is eating out of their toilet.
