Last Thursday, Senator Kirsten Gillibrand’s bill to reform military sexual assault policies failed to overcome a filibuster against stiff opposition from Senator Claire McCaskill, whose alternative bill passed cloture 100-0. Amy Davidson explains the shortcomings of Gillibrand’s effort to remove rape investigations from the chain of command:
McCaskill, who has prosecuted sexual-assault cases herself, has argued that, as well-meaning as it sounds, pulling out sexual assault in this way would result in fewer prosecutions. Part of the reasoning is technical and structural: while commanders are motivated by discipline and order (as well as, one hopes, respect for the law and concern for and loyalty to all their troops), prosecutors are often looking for cases that they can win. If it is left up to the prosecutors alone, they might have a more jaundiced view of how a jury would hear a witness than does a commander—again, no longer the unit commander, and no longer alone.
And part has to do with the changing culture of the military: McCaskill and others have fought hard to make commanders more responsible for addressing the crisis of sexual assault in their ranks, not less so.
Marcotte’s verdict: both bills were good, but not great:
While both bills have a lot to offer victims, including more direct assistance and more assurance that their charges will be taken seriously, in the end it seems that there just may not be a perfect policy solution to the problem of sexual assault in the military.
As with the civilian world, the obstacles to getting justice for victims are more about culture than about the structure of the justice system: reflexive victim-blaming, the difficulties in distinguishing rape from consensual sex when there are no outside witnesses, and the myth that false rape accusations are more common than they are. Regardless of their differences, both McCaskill and Gillibrand have done a great service in keeping this debate in the public eye, which will go a long way toward changing the culture so that victims of sexual assault are taken more seriously by everyone.
Just as the chain of command provision failed in the Senate, news broke that the top Army prosecutor for sex assault cases had been suspended after a lawyer who worked for him alleged that he had tried to grope her at a military legal conference.
Ugh. To read more on the subject, check out the long Dish thread on military rape from last year.
Bouncing off Paul’s CPAC barn-burner, Philip Klein wonders if the GOP would regress on civil liberties under a Republican president:
Following Paul’s speech, I spoke with Matt Kibbe, president of the limited-government activist group FreedomWorks, about whether the momentum for a greater focus on civil liberties would be stopped if Republicans recaptured the White House.
“The younger people that are joining either the Republican Party or the conservative movement care about civil liberties a lot,” Kibbe argued. “And so it’s going to be hard to put the genie back in the bottle unless you want the party to die out.”
My view is that under a Republican president, criticism of any perceived overreaching on surveillance would be greater than it was under Bush, but not nearly as fierce as it is under Obama.
That’s a pretty inarguable fact. If he wins the nomination, of course, all this would be moot, and we’d finally be able to see what might happen in a genuine libertarian were to become president. But even if Paul loses, he will surely open the debate in the primaries on this subject, and as Klein notes, be a thorn in the side of any future surveillance state enthusiasm in a Republican administration. And indications of a genuine libertarian resurgence in the GOP are increasing:
Today on the main stage [at CPAC] in front of a packed audience of several hundred I watched a Republican governor from Texas brag about closing prisons while mocking California’s woefully over-stuffed corrections facilities. Rick Perry’s criminal justice record is by no means angelic, but he is at or near the head of the gubernatorial class when it comes to meaningful reform.)
Groups like Right on Crime now compete for booth space with Families Against Mandatory Minimums, Justice Fellowship, and—shockingly to those of us of a certain age—Conservatives Concerned About the Death Penalty. The libertarian project of criminal justice reform is coming to this country in 2014, and though some important impetus has come from self-identified libertarian Republicans …, much of it has also come from social conservatives with hearts open to redemption, and fiscal conservatives shocked at the bottom line. Libertarian projects become viable when non-libertarians (and even anti-libertarians) embrace them.
I just wonder how the absence of Obama will impact the Republican id in these matters.
(Photo: Students Dragana Bozic (L) of New York City and Pi Praveen of Durham, NC, pose for a photograph with a life-size cutout photo of Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) at the Conservative Political Action Conference at the Gaylord International Hotel and Conference Center in National Harbor, Maryland on March 7, 2014 . By Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Marcotte calls the opening of the country’s first abortion clinic/birthing center in Buffalo “a major step in the right direction”:
“In our clinic, we have RNs, LPNs, social workers, counselors, and trained medical personnel, in addition to our physicians, to assist our patients,” the general information page reads. But having a single clinic provide both birthing and abortion services doesn’t need to be rooted in feminist ideology. Having a single place to go for all your pregnancy needs instead of sorting patients out depending on their preconceptions about outcome is just plain common sense. Being able to go to the same doctor to give birth and have an abortion at different times in your life is likely comforting for patients.
Because as Verónica Bayetti Flores notes, “one in three women will have had an abortion in their lifetime, and most either are mothers already or go on to become mothers.” Meanwhile, Caitlin Keefe Moran, who volunteers as a patient escort at a different abortion clinic, offers insight into the fraught dynamics between patients, anti-abortion protestors, and the escorts who act as a buffer:
Laughter is our only power.
When we greet patients with a smile and calmly walk them to the clinic door, unruffled by the screaming and pamphlets thrust into their hands and graphic signs lining the sidewalk, we win a small victory. When a patient smiles back at me, or tries to make a little joke, I feel like throwing a parade. Smiling in the face of unmitigated hostility is both a method of self-preservation and an act of defiance.
On one of these occasions, I greet a patient with what can only be described as the Hugh Grant two-handed wave from Love Actually. As [clinic volunteer] Ruby and I laugh about it afterward, an older protester, a woman I don’t recognize, corners me against the wall, her finger in my face, to tell me that all the babies I have helped kill will dance around me on Judgment Day. I let her talk. This is another strategy: we engage the protesters, encourage them to shame and bully and taunt us, to distract them from the patients.
“And all of those babies will be black!” she adds. Black genocide is a favorite topic among the protesters. Their leaflets on the genocidal elimination of babies of color drive Ruby, the mixed-race daughter of a black woman, cross-eyed with rage. It’s an easy way to demonize everyone involved: to the protesters, the white escorts like me invade minority neighborhoods to kill black babies, and the escorts of color like Ruby are traitors to their race. So are the patients of color seeking abortion. And the green grass grows all around all around and we’re all murderers and racists.
I’m sure you have well-thought-out opinions on this, but I’m not sure why you are so committed to not having advertising on your site. Don’t get me wrong; I don’t miss it … but I don’t begrudge it either. No more complicated than I don’t care that Tiffany’s has a longstanding corner ad in the NYT, or the luxury jewelry/car ads in between. Are readers really put off by ads? I’ll agree that you don’t want some sort of advertising control of content, but can that be a concern? Just don’t make them annoying Internet pop-up ads requiring people to “close/X” them away. But do use “banner ads” all you want.
The truth is: we’re not opposed to ads in principle and never have been. And my long-standing stance against sponsored content is not about ads, but dishonest ones. So why don’t we have them? It’s partly a function of being a tiny little company with no publisher. But it also comes from a sense that readers are prepared to pay for the site in part because it has such a high signal-to-noise ratio. As the rest of the web becomes insanely cluttered and distracting, we hope the Dish will become even more distinctive with our white space, and simple design. What we are actively considering, however, is serving ads for non-subscribers. That would give us another revenue stream, while still retaining an ad-free site for committed subscribers. Another reader is even less averse to ads:
What is wrong with putting Google Ads (or equivalent) on the top or right side of the page, get the income you’d get, and whatever the shortfall is, ask your readers to cover? What’s the harm? The ads are clearly labeled as such (check), and the advertisers are not trying to influence your content (check). Further – Google Ads are actually often helpful – Google (for better or worse) knows our interests well, and the ads they serve up to me on various websites are often quite useful alerting me that favorite website is having a sale on XYZ.
Another, on the other hand, isn’t a fan of ad networks like Google Ads:
I resubscribed for $250 a year. I will renew hubby’s as well; it’s a toss-up which of us is on the site more of the day. I thought of my renewal in a couple of ways: First, as a donation, similar to how I’d support any cause I believe in and/or benefit from (without the tax deduction, but who cares.) And I really appreciate no ads. That can not be understated.
This morning I was scrolling through my local paper, The Brattleboro Reformer (of which you posted a great mistake headline from last year) and was once again confronted by an absolutely disgusting photo of toe nail fungus. There is no way to get the ad not to show up. Perhaps this is your best advertisement for folks to willingly renew. So they are not confronted with this photo in exchange for reading some news??
Thanks for all you do, and for steering clear of Google Ads.
Several more readers weigh in:
As my re-up date approached, I remained somewhat ambivalent. Then, the other day, I went to the newly reconfigured and utterly awful New York Times page. Blown-up fonts surrounded by distracting, flashing ads – I’ve really cut down on going there as a result. And it reminded me of what I was already taking for granted: The Dish’s clean, non-distracting appearance, where your eyes don’t work overtime so that your brain can be more fully engaged.
So I just doubled my subscription rate, for a number of reasons: For your commitment to honest debate, for the great flow of content (including the Saturday and Sunday themes), for the recognition of the vital role of poetry, for your “long” pieces – especially your essay on Francis – and for saying “fuck you” to the ever-encroaching corrosiveness of advertising. I’m looking forward to another good year.
Another in the “no ads” camp:
This founding member doubled his initial subscription amount. If I can afford to give NPR $5 a month, I can afford to pay the Dish $50 a year, when you all are working your asses off, and, better than that, doing it with integrity and no advertising. I hate fucking advertising.
Another:
After a year as a “founding member”, I was nevertheless hesitant to renew again. While I fully supported the experiment that you were undertaking, I’d hoped, perhaps against reason, that more of your audience would be willing to follow suit and would give you the funds required to launch the kinds of independent reporting and commissioned pieces that you’d described in your initial pitch. I was thrilled by the first release of Deep Dish, “I Was Wrong“, even though I never got through it – the concept alone was enlivening. But as the year ended without entirely reaching your goal, I couldn’t shake a feeling that maybe you’d pushed as far as your audience was willing to go.
Last week, however, I signed into the New York Times website to see a Verizon ad taking up a the entire right-hand side of my screen, jammed into the spot just below where the Opinion section ordinarily goes. This is not the only time that this has happened. Like many of your readers, I run Ad Block Plus constantly, and have grown accustomed to an ad-free Internet. The umbrage I felt at seeing this Times ad shoehorned into empty space helped me to realize what several of your readers feel when they claim, insanely, that the Internet should remain free. It’s difficult to change how people approach these things, and difficult to appreciate when different realities might require different strategies. What I admire most about your work is that you understand this, that you welcome it, and that you’re open and honest about it.
The Times, meanwhile, isn’t. The fact is that I’m asked to pay the Times $15 every four weeks (not even a month mind you) in order, in theory, to keep animated GIFs of Marshall Faulk plugging Verizon to a minimum. Since this has happened more than once, I imagine that the Times and their advertisers have gone out of their way to make sure that these ads can be snuck around AdBlock. But even if not, shouldn’t my subscription buy me this much? The Times wants their cake and everything else too. Whose approach would I prefer – yours or theirs?
So as of this moment, I’m canceling my subscription to the New York Times, taking a quarter of the money that I’d pay them in a given year, rounding it up to make it a clean $50, and giving it to you. I’ll plan to distribute the rest in gifts to friends and family throughout the year, but I hope that this is enough for now to move you towards your goal.
One more:
I’m happy to renew and threw in a few extra bucks because you asked politely and with good reason. I think there is value to an independent site that does not rely on advertising bucks. And I hope it stays that way, but I can imagine the lure as you continue to fight to gain traction. Hopefully you will openly share with us as you wrestle with the advertising demon.
(Images: Three network ads that have run on the Dish in the past)
Jeremy Lott expects the peninsula’s referendum on annexation to Russia to pass:
You don’t have to buy Russian President Vladimir Putin’s public spin this was a far right coup to see why most residents of the Crimea might prefer the stability and familiar corruption of Russia to the protests and uncertainty of the Ukraine.
Russia was able to take the Crimea without firing a shot. The military has been able to hold it so far with only warning shots because Turchinov’s government is disorganized and torn. It is unwilling to risk a wider war over this pariah region, and this reluctance is only bolstering Russia’s claim.
It’s hard to gauge the sentiments of an occupied people, but many locals have spontaneously told reporters they are not unhappy with the outcome. “If the Russians weren’t here, the government of Ukraine would come and occupy us,” retired stage actor Vladimir Sukhenko told the AP. “They would make us speak Ukrainian.”
But Tomila Lankina believes the Crimeans might come to regret it:
The first point to note is that given Crimea’s strategic importance for Russia, the region is, and is very likely to remain, heavily militarized. Russian federal legislation has special provisions for governance of localities with substantial military, scientific, or strategic significance.
These entities are referred to as science cities, “Naukogrady,” closed territorial formations (Zakrytoe administratvno-territorial’noe obrazovanie), or closed military towns (Zakrytye voennye gorodki). The Crimea and its municipalities with particular strategic significance are therefore likely to be subject to some form of direct administration or, at the very least, high levels of de facto central control over their politics and governance.
Ian Bremmer does some math and wonders whether the region is worth fighting for:
Between balancing Crimea’s budget and fulfilling its pension obligations, Ukraine shells out $1.1 billion a year to prop up its southern peninsula. And that’s not including the $3 billion investment Crimea needs to repair its crumbling infrastructure. This is all for a region with a gross product of around $4 billion—just 0.2 percent the size of Russia’s $2 trillion economy.
Posner argues that if Crimea secedes, it won’t violate international law:
Ukraine could certainly try to stop its territory from seceding–just as the United States fought to prevent the South from seceding–but if it fails, it can’t complain that the secession violates international law. Ukraine’s best argument is that the secession was driven by Russian meddling–Russia’s invasion of Crimea did violate international law, and the occupation violates Ukraine’s sovereignty. But if the referendum is free and fair, that argument will lose much of its force. Perhaps, Ukraine is owed some remedy by Russia (good luck), but that remedy could not be an injunction on Crimean secession, which would injure the Crimeans themselves.
But even this relatively expansive vision of secession rights is not enough to justify what may soon happen in Crimea. The reason is that Crimean secession for the purpose of joining Russia is likely to result in human rights violations. It is safe to assume that Russian rule in Crimea will be at least as oppressive as it now is in Russia itself. And that rule has included numerous severe violations of human rights, including censorship of opposition speech, intimidation and imprisonment of dissidents, and persecution of gays and lesbians, among others. Vladimir Putin has ruled Russia exactly as one would expect from a former KGB officer. There is no reason to believe that he would rule Crimea any differently.
As for the rest of eastern Ukraine, Ralph S. Clem points out that it is unlikely to follow Crimea’s path:
Owing to a surge of ethnic Russian in-migration before and after World War II and population losses among Ukrainians and many of the ethnic minorities (in particular Jews and Crimean Tatars) in the interwar and World War II periods, the proportion of Russians in the oblasts of eastern Ukraine increased. Figures from the last Soviet census in 1989 reveal that the ethnic Russian component of eastern Ukraine’s population had increased to 36 percent; again, the lure was primarily jobs in the rapidly expanding coal and metallurgical complexes in the region. The ethnic Ukrainian share for eastern Ukraine dropped to 58 percent over this period. Importantly however, the first post-Soviet census count in Ukraine in 2001 showed a dramatic decrease in the number of ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine — probably through a combination of low natural increase and changing self-identification from Russian to Ukrainian — and a growth in the numbers of Ukrainians, such that the Russian proportion of the region’s population dropped to just under 30 percent and the Ukrainian share grew to 66 percent. Thus, since independence, eastern Ukraine has become more Ukrainian.
Molly Ball captures the atmosphere at CPAC during Rand Paul’s speech:
Though CPAC draws right-wingers of all stripes, from Oliver North to Santorum to a guy on stilts in a Ronald Reagan costume, it is increasingly dominated by libertarians, a combined result of their passionate engagement in movement politics and the discount rates the conference offers to college students. That makes it, for Paul, something of a hometown crowd. On Saturday, he won the conference’s straw poll in a landslide. The enormous ballroom at the convention center in the Washington suburbs was crammed with an audience of thousands for his speech on Friday, which Paul devoted exclusively to civil-liberties issues.
Paul castigated a progressive majoritarianism run amok, whose free-floating definition of legitimacy puts all minorities at risk, whether the racial minorities persecuted in generations past, or minorities of ideas at risk in the present day. He made frequent reference to his fight against the security state’s overreaches, and insisted upon the imperative importance of specific warrants and open, free trials instead of general warrants and secret determinations of guilt. Finally, Paul closed on a muscular message rejecting the gradualist’s insistence on a hesitant program of changes, telling the CPAC crowd that their job is not to minimize liberty lost, but to maximize liberty.
I find myself wanting Paul to go the distance in the 2016 primaries. No, that’s not because I want Clinton to win (if she’s the Democratic nominee). It’s because Paul would facilitate a younger demographic for Republicans, and that can only be good – for the GOP and the rest of us.
Perhaps the most crippling disadvantage the GOP now has is its dependence on seniors for political clout. We know just how divergent today’s generations are – to such an extent that they are effectively foreign countries to each other. 61 percent of Millennials are white, compared with over 80 percent for the pre-boomers – creating an entirely different rite of passage into adulthood. 26 percent are married, compared with 65 percent of pre-boomers and 48 percent of boomers. Millennials have far less trust in institutions, including political parties, and on social issues, Millennials are far more libertarian than their elders: marriage equality is simply a given for them, and legalizing weed a no-brainer.
On current trends, the GOP has close to no chance of winning over this demographic unless it loses its discomfort with non-whites and gays, if it pledges a re-run of George W Bush’s foreign policy, if it keeps championing the war on drugs, or the surveillance state. The widening generational gap between the parties is already unprecedented in modern times. And one segment of the voters is dying, and the other is gaining strength. Unless the GOP manages to find a way to re-brand itself with the next generation, it is facing an existence on life-support – and each pandering message to the Fox News demo will only serve to alienate Millennials.
Rand Paul is one answer to this. If he were to run against the archetypal boomer, Hillary Clinton, around the themes of individual liberty at home and non-interventionism abroad, he could immediately put the GOP on the Millennial side of this generational struggle. Even if he were crushed by Clinton, the GOP’s image would be re-made in a way much more attractive to the under-30s.
His main problem, it seems to me, is racial.
The libertarian position on the Civil Rights Act, while bracing as an intellectual critique of expansive government, is nonetheless toxic to the next generation. Ditto the Republican base’s view on immigration. And there is the problem of the unbearable whiteness of the Libertarian coalition:
A poll released by the Public Religion Research Institute in October 2013 showed that 22 percent of Americans consider themselves libertarian or lean libertarian. Forty-five percent of libertarians side with Republicans, while 5 percent identify as Democrats. Fifty-three percent of libertarians consider themselves reliable primary voters. … As Claire Thompson noted in February 2012, self-described libertarians trend “white, male, and financially secure.” Which happens to be how much of the party writ large trends. If they can only keep the twentysomethings that look like them on board, the Republican Party is going to continue to attract fewer and fewer members of the electorate. Libertarians may grow, but right now, trending toward the Rand model doesn’t seem the safest outreach.
Ironically, despite all the love, Rand didn’t bring his A game. He was hoarse, he looked tired, and his speech (basic theme: government tyranny is bad) wasn’t particularly soaring. Not that he is ever a really electrifying orator. He tends toward the wonky, goes heavy on historical references, and likes to quote folks like Montesquieu.
But nobody cared. The crowd loved him. These were his people, and they were whooping and hollering and chanting and fist-pumping like it was Saturday night at the roller derby. By the time Rand wrapped it all up by calling on the crowd to “Stand with me! Stand together for liberty!” at least half the room would have followed him down to the gates of hell if he’d asked.
If I were among the conservative movement’s values voters or hawks, I’d be getting mighty nervous right about now.
And if I were a Republican, I’d be feeling a few twinges of hope.
Fred Kaplan thinks the sanctions the US imposed on Russia last week were a mistake:
[I]f Putin had been looking for some way out of this mess, he certainly wouldn’t be looking any longer, because de-escalating now would make it seem that he was backing down under Western pressure. Obama has had two long phone conversations with Putin in recent days, but as long as he insists on preconditions for renewed diplomacy (Putin must return his troops to their base, he must sit down with Ukrainian officials), Putin has no reason to comply. Russia has deeper interests in Ukraine than the West does—and more localized sources of pressure to make those interests felt.
That being the case, Putin can sit and wait. He has the upper hand in this game—and the more the West plays on his terms, the stronger his hand will seem. Sanctions won’t change his behavior, except to stiffen it—and once that becomes clear, Putin will seem stronger, the West will seem weaker, and a solution to the Ukraine crisis will recede in the distance.
In general, trying to bludgeon another government into changing its behavior very rarely achieves anything positive, and the danger in trying this against a larger power is that it could then retaliate with punitive measures of its own. That would make the crisis harder to resolve and inflict damage on Western economies in the process, which would in turn spur demands for still harsher measures. Russia is already threatening to block inspections for the current arms reduction treaty, and it could choose to make things more difficult for the U.S. on other issues as well. Many Westerners seem very eager to demand economic punishment of Russia, but I suspect very few actually want to pay the price that could be associated with it.
Drezner approaches the issue from a different angle:
The first thing to understand about sanctioning Russia over its incursion into Crimea has nothing to do with the impact of the sanctions and everything to do with what is being demanded of Moscow. The United States wants Russia to withdraw military forces from a piece of territory they have long coveted. However much Russia has contravened international law over the past week, they’ve changed the facts on the ground. They control Crimea, and public opinion in that autonomous republic is pretty Russo-friendly. The current status quo for Russia is that they control that territory. In world politics, there is no greater demand to ask of a government than to make de facto or de jure territorial concessions. The domestic and international ramifications of such a concession are massive — especially after force was used to occupy the territory. So recognize that the demand being attached to the sanctions is so large that success is extremely unlikely.
For my money, the biggest price Putin is paying comes not from any possible sanctions, but from the very clear message he’s now sent to bordering countries who have long been suspicious of him anyway. Yes, Putin has shown that he’s not to be trifled with. At the same time, he’s also shown every one of his neighbors that he can’t be trusted. Two mini-invasions in less than a decade is plenty to ramp up their anti-Russian sentiment to a fever pitch.
Wise or not, sanctions are the most popular course of action, a new poll finds:
While almost 59 percent of Americans do support the U.S. and its allies imposing sanctions on Russia slightly over half oppose sending economic aid to Ukraine, and over 75 percent are against sending military supplies to Ukraine.
When it comes to possible military responses to the Ukraine crisis Americans are overwhelmingly opposed, with only 12 percent of respondents saying they would support having American troops on the ground in Ukraine and 17 percent saying they would support U.S. airstrikes on Russia forces in Ukraine.
Linda Besner wonders if the promise of an Internet as a great cultural leveler – granting an audience to obscure artists as well as to the well-known and well-funded – might be wildly overstated:
In The People’s Platform, [author Astra] Taylor discusses how the supposedly open, free, and hierarchy-busting world wide web has failed to do better than a roomful of public television commissioners in encouraging the production or consumption of risky independent cultural products. In fact, it does significantly worse. Internet traffic follows a statistical pattern known as power law distribution; essentially, while there is a wide range of available options, almost everyone is crowded together at the most popular end of the spectrum. It’s a problem that’s getting worse: “In 2001, ten Web sites accounted for 31 per cent of U.S. page views,” Taylor writes, “by 2010, that number had skyrocketed to 75 percent.” Most nights, 40 per cent of the U.S.’s bandwidth is taken up by people watching Netflix movies.
In a similar vein, Dougald Hine challenges notions of the Internet as an agent of “liberation from the boredom of industrial society, a psychedelic jet-spray of information into every otherwise tedious corner of our lives”:
At best, it allows us to distract ourselves with the potentially endless deferral of clicking from one link to another. Yet sooner or later we wash up downstream in some far corner of the web, wondering where the time went. The experience of being carried on these currents is quite different to the patient, unpredictable process that leads towards meaning.
The latter requires, among other things, space for reflection – allowing what we have already absorbed to settle, waiting to see what patterns emerge. Find the corners of our lives in which we can unplug, the days on which it is possible to refuse the urgency of the inbox, the activities that will not be rushed. Switch off the infinity machine, not forever, nor because there is anything bad about it, but out of recognition of our own finitude: there is only so much information any of us can bear, and we cannot go fishing in the stream if we are drowning in it.
[R]esearchers led by Semir Zeki of University College London asked 16 mathematicians to rate 60 equations on a scale ranging from “ugly” to “beautiful.” Two weeks later, the mathematicians viewed the same equations and rated them again while lying inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner.
The scientists found that the more beautiful an equation was to the mathematician, the more activity his or her brain showed in an area called the A1 field of the medial orbitofrontal cortex. The orbitofrontal cortex is associated with emotion, and this particular region of it has shown in previous tests to be correlated with emotional responses to visual and musical beauty. …
The study found … that the beauty of equations is not entirely subjective. Most of the mathematicians agreed on which equations were beautiful and which were ugly, with Euler’s identity, 1+eiπ=0, consistently rated the most attractive equation in the lot. “Here are these three fundamental numbers, e, pi and i,” [mathematician Colin] Adams says, “all defined independently and all critically important in their own way, and suddenly you have this relationship between them encompassed in this equation that has a grand total of seven symbols in it? It is dumbfounding.”
(Image of Euler’s Identity scarification via Flickr user gruntzooki)
Is it meaningful to say an electron “chooses” to jump the way it does? Obviously, there’s no way to prove it. The only evidence we could have (that we can’t predict what it’s going to do), we do have. But it’s hardly decisive. Still, if one wants a consistently materialist explanation of the world—that is, if one does not wish to treat the mind as some supernatural entity imposed on the material world, but rather as simply a more complex organization of processes that are already going on, at every level of material reality—then it makes sense that something at least a little like intentionality, something at least a little like experience, something at least a little like freedom, would have to exist on every level of physical reality as well.
Why do most of us, then, immediately recoil at such conclusions? Why do they seem crazy and unscientific? Or more to the point, why are we perfectly willing to ascribe agency to a strand of DNA (however “metaphorically”), but consider it absurd to do the same with an electron, a snowflake, or a coherent electromagnetic field?
The answer, it seems, is because it’s pretty much impossible to ascribe self-interest to a snowflake. If we have convinced ourselves that rational explanation of action can consist only of treating action as if there were some sort of self-serving calculation behind it, then by that definition, on all these levels, rational explanations can’t be found. Unlike a DNA molecule, which we can at least pretend is pursuing some gangster-like project of ruthless self-aggrandizement, an electron simply does not have a material interest to pursue, not even survival. It is in no sense competing with other electrons. If an electron is acting freely—if it, as Richard Feynman is supposed to have said, “does anything it likes”—it can only be acting freely as an end in itself. Which would mean that at the very foundations of physical reality, we encounter freedom for its own sake—which also means we encounter the most rudimentary form of play.
Update from a reader:
I’m a grad student in evolutionary biology and currently TA an introductory evolution course. I had a strong reaction to your post – one surely expected by Mr. Graeber, but perhaps worth airing.
First, the scare-quotes around “metaphorically” are misplaced. This usage is the literal definition of metaphor. Evolutionary biologists talk about the agency of DNA as useful conceptual shorthand, which accurately describes the outcomes of genetic evolution while grossly misrepresenting the mechanism. “The allele wants to help the copies of itself carried in other individuals,” is easier to say and is more intuitive to communicate than “the frequency in the population of alleles encoding for behaviors that harm the individual but help close relatives will increase if the cost to the individual’s reproductive output is less than the benefit to reproduction received by the relative multiplied by the probability a copy of the allele is also carried by the relative.” The statistical sorting leaves behind genes suited for propagation, so the ‘selfish’ analogy works better for genes than for snowflakes.
Second, the evolutionary explanation for consciousness and free will isn’t really addressed. Like so much of biodiversity, it can be seen as an adaptive emergent trait. Behavioral plasticity is a huge advantage. Deterministic links between particular stimuli and behaviors are widespread across the tree of life, but cannot accommodate novel stimuli and likely do not scale to the number of relevant stimuli encountered by complex animals. Breaking the deterministic links in favor of flexible decision making is exactly the kind of solution consistently ‘discovered’ by natural evolution. The emergence hypothesis seems to me more plausible than particular agency, for at least two reasons.
One is that, while the behavior of electrons cannot only be predicted probabilistically, there are many levels of biological organization between electrons and humanity that behave in an exceptionally predictable manner. In the lab, I use enzymes to manipulate DNA molecules; no such science would be possible if these proteins were not reliable replicating, cutting, and ligating machines.
Second, I suspect most people would agree that consciousness is present in non-human animals, and would further agree that, whatever it is, there is more of it in an ape or octopus than a fly, jellyfish, or sunflower. Agency as we observe it correlates strongly with neural complexity, which fits well with the notion that a sense of self emerges from the billions of neural connections housed in large-brained animals.
I don’t mean to go full “dick-head athiest” on you. The piece certainly is interesting, thought provoking, and the sort of thing that brings me back to your blog (and reupping my subscription any day now). It reminds me of my go-to response if I’m asked about my belief in God, to avoid the unfortunate conversation that can so easily follow: No I don’t believe in God, but I do believe in electrons.
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