Tuesday, 13 January 2004

It's effective because it's true.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 10:38 am. comments.

Tuesday, 13 January 2004

Why you green-blooded, inhuman— I stopped reading Steven Den Beste several weeks ago, after one of his Tolstoy-sized epics began with the disclaimer "This is preposterously long"—the idea of an article so long that Steven was obliged to issue a warning sent me screaming off to Instapundit for some short and pithy right-wing blogging. Since then I've skimmed a few of Steven's more digestible novels, but I haven't really paid full attention.

I think what Steven has been saying lately, though (in his own uniquely wordy way), is that we're living in a Harrison Bergeron world, and the players are divided into three camps:

• The Harrison Bergerons (a.k.a. the Right) are the strong, powerful types that the other two groups want to keep in chains. They have rational minds, believe in equal opportunity (but not equal outcome), want to achieve their fullest potential, and think of the less fortunate as weak and inferior beings.
• The George and Hazel Bergerons (a.k.a. the Left) are slavishly devoted to equality of outcome, even if it means that everyone is held to the lowest common demoninator. They're willing to handicap themselves in order to "make things fair" for the disadvantaged, and they value consensus regardless of whether it's right or wrong.
• And the Diana Moon Glampers-es (a.k.a. "the Islamists") would rather see Harrison dead than allow him to soar above his fellow beings. In Vonnegut's story, Glampers is a government official called the Handicapper General, but she suffers from no self-imposed hardships; she merely imposes them—forcefully—upon others.

At least, these are the nuggets of content I've panned out of a river of authentic frontier gibberish (p-idealism? Transactional possessives?) that Steven has penned as of late.

John W. Gardner was the founder of Common Cause—a public-interest group dedicated to public accountability and open government—and was the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare under President Lyndon Johnson. Gardner wrote a book which I highly recommend to anyone concerned about "equality of opportunity" vs. "equality of outcome:" Excellence: Can We Be Equal and Excellent Too?

Gardner recognized a few basic points about the two kinds of equality that are worth repeating here: Equality of opportunity, while highly desirable, is often impossibly difficult to measure by scientific means. You can't get an MRI scan of the hiring manager's head that will tell you whether she's screening by qualifications or by color, and human beings are differentiated in so many ways that it's almost impossible to isolate the variables. You can't find a person who is identical to yourself in every aspect but gender, and then run you both through some double-blind tests in order to have a control variable.

Equality of outcome, on the other hand, is seductively easy to measure: You just divide people into categories and then compare the percentages to the general population. Simple. Reproducible. Scientific, to an extent—although the Harrison Bergerons of the world will immediately shout out "correlation does not prove causation!" and be justified in doing so. Science (or, more properly, the "scientific method" of experimentation and peer review) doesn't offer nearly as many tools for investigating a situation that can't be reproduced and repeated: There isn't any way that a model of "global warming" can be proven, for example. We can just go around in circles indefinitely, questioning the initial assumptions of the modelers, until the earth either boils or freezes over—at which point somebody will be proven right, but it'll be too late to take action.

Gardner also recognizes that "equality of outcome" should not be a goal in itself, although a reasonable concern over outcomes is healthy for our society: If failed business ventures led directly to starvation, there'd be a lot fewer entrepreneurs… and if there isn't any movement from poverty to wealth and vice versa, then society stagnates and becomes politically unstable. True equality of outcome, if enforced, would remove all incentive for excellence and leave us with a lazy man's socialism: The hardest worker and the least competent slacker would both get the same paycheck. What we (as a society) really want is equal outcomes for equal input, which is extraordinarily difficult to measure, and which leads us into all sorts of difficult gaming-the-system traps.

Gardner didn't offer any pat answers to this dilemma, because there aren't any; he did argue, though, that the underlying ambition should always be to produce excellence in every endeavor—that a society which passively accepts mediocrity was already in a state of decline.

Going back to Steven's dissertation—which, as I understand it, will be concluded with a third part (Return of the King?) sometime in the near future—I'm obliged to point out: Steven is setting up an elaborately detailed straw man, for what will undoubtedly be an epic demolition. Steven's caricature of the lit-crit professor in his ivory tower, turning his back on the scientific method and spinning out subjective jargon/babble for other solipsists to digest and validate, is what you get when the Right fantasizes about the opponent it would most like to debate. This isn't going to lead to any valuable insights about the gap between Left and Right; it's not even going to lead to a reasoned, objective examination of opposing views.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 9:18 am. comments.

Tuesday, 13 January 2004

Lost opportunity. Last month I wrote that President Bush had a window of opportunity to capitalize on Saddam's capture, and announce changes to his Iraq policy from a position of strength: Like Lincoln after Antietam, Bush had a rare chance to issue proclamations that at other times might have been dismissed as desperation.

But where Lincoln took advantage of the opening provided by Antietam, Bush has allowed the leverage he could have gained from Saddam's capture to slowly ebb away without any action on his part. Having Saddam behind bars boosted initiatives that Bush had already begun, such as James Baker's arm-twisting junket to convince foreign leaders to forgive Iraqi debts—and, of course, it helped our troops' ongoing efforts to establish the rule of law in Iraq. But Bush didn't capitalize on the moment of Saddam's arrest to announce any new policies or improve existing ones.

Bush could have presented a timetable for Iraq's first democratic elections, a plan to reconstitute the Iraqi army, or even recycled his ill-timed speech from November announcing a shift in U.S. policy and our newfound desire to promote democracy in the Mideast. (Imagine how much more effective that speech would have been, had it come on the heels of Saddam's incarceration!) In mid-December Bush could have enacted these policies and thrown a combination punch at his political foes; instead he landed a glancing blow, one that Dean and company will shake off before November. In another month Saddam's capture will be old news (if it isn't already), and Bush may be defensively explaining how our armies got into the briar patch—or why he diverted our troops from more pressing concerns, such as the continuing pursuit of Osama.

In any case, changes to Iraq policy will now (once again) be spun as evidence that Karl Rove is desperately trying to shore up Bush's polling numbers in time for the elections. The window has closed, and Bush missed the opportunity.

- Posted by Scott Forbes at 7:15 am. comments.