Multivoiced

Lawrence Summers writes:

In a world where Americans can legitimately doubt whether the success of the global economy is good for them, it will be increasingly difficult to mobilise support for economic internationalism. The focus must shift from supporting internationalism as traditionally defined to designing an internationalism that more successfully aligns the interests of working people and the middle class in rich countries with the success of the global economy. This will be the subject of my next column, which will appear on Monday May 5.

Colman responds to Summers:

He’s unable to break free of the standard economic consensus, but realises that that noise in the distance is the rumblings of the masses slowly coming to the conclusion that the consequences of the way globalisation is being implemented is not in their interest. They’re beginning to get mad, and they’re liable to do dangerous things when they get mad.

Center for American Progress Advisor Sally Steenland (whom I have spoken with personally and regard highly) is arguing that Barack and Hillary should talk about science at the upcoming “Compassion Forum” at Messiah College in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. In her mind, they ought to address scientific and moral problems as one. She refers to these ruminative chimeras as “scientific–moral problems”.

I am not sure how to react. On one hand, uncomfortable moves like this may become increasingly necessary in a country where people cannot walk to the voting booth without tripping over their faith. On the other hand, there is a part of me which finds Steenland’s proposal repugnant: Conflating the protocols of science, morals, and politics is the very same act that leads people to take political action for the brotherly and sisterly love of usually unseen, microscopic, diploid eukaryotes called “stem cells”.

But what single good, ultimately, does Steenland argue for in this essay on science and morals? Get ready for it: competition in a global marketplace!

Indeed, after eight disastrous years of the Bush administration’s neglecting science and distorting it into sectarian ideology, it is time for our national leaders to acknowledge the crucial importance of science in our lives. In order to compete in global markets and prosper as a nation, we need scientifically literate citizens.

Never mind coöperation; never mind the commons; never mind diversity; never mind human capabilities. This is how strongly the discourse of “competition” and “the market” have strangled the U.S. political conversation. Even a premiere progressive Washington think tank can’t avoid the trap. So next time you’re wondering why to converse about science and morals, just think about your illustrious role as an actor in the price system of a fabulously Anglo-Diseased marketplace. You might even have a good conversation about the Singularity over Baco noir with the yacht owner nearest you.

Andrew Revkin explained yesterday how he thinks the climate debate has become “a lot more complicated”. Revkin is now framing the serious part of the debate as a conflict between those who believe that capping greenhouse gas emissions will be good enough, and those who believe the solution lies, as Revkin puts it, in “radically advanced low-carbon technologies”. In this conversation, the lead voices ostensibly are, on the techno-fix side, Jeffrey Sachs from Columbia’s Earth Institute (one of my personal favorite entertainers — yes, I have a strange taste in entertainment) and on the emissions capping side, Joseph Romm from the Center for American Progress Action Fund. (Romm, incidentally, is a harsh critic of Michael Shellenberger, Ted Nordhaus, and Bjørn Lomborg.)

For the sake of convenience, I have tried to summarize Sachs’s argument as follows.

1. Premise 1: An attempt to restrain emissions “without a fundamentally new set of technologies” will stifle economic growth and “the development prospects for billions of people.”
2. Premise 2: A cap-and-trade system (like the one advocated by the Center for American Progress) or a carbon tax, cannot, by itself, reduce emissions.
3. Conclusion: Because of the high costs and negligible benefits of cap-and-trade, we need new technologies. In Sachs’s words: “By 2010 at the latest, the world should be breaking ground on demonstration CCS coal-fired plants in China, India, Europe and the U.S.; the wealthy nations should be helping to finance and build concentrated solar-thermal plants in states that border the Sahara; and highly subsidized plug-in hybrids should be rolling off the assembly line.”

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On April 1, Eliezer Yudkowsky (pictured) released an announcement that the brain is made of neurons.

In an amazing breakthrough, a multinational team of scientists led by Nobel laureate Santiago Ramón y Cajal announced that the brain is composed of a ridiculously complicated network of tiny cells connected to each other by infinitesimal threads and branches.

The multinational team — which also includes the famous technician Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, and possibly Imhotep, promoted to the Egyptian god of medicine — issued this statement:

“The present discovery culminates years of research indicating that the convoluted squishy thing inside our skulls is even more complicated than it looks. Thanks to Cajal’s application of a new staining technique invented by Camillo Golgi, we have learned that this structure is not a continuous network like the blood vessels of the body, but is actually composed of many tiny cells, or “neurons”, connected to one another by even more tiny filaments.

“Other extensive evidence, beginning from Greek medical researcher Alcmaeon and continuing through Paul Broca’s research on speech deficits, indicates that the brain is the seat of reason.

“Nemesius, the Bishop of Emesia, has previously argued that brain tissue is too earthy to act as an intermediary between the body and soul, and so the mental faculties are located in the ventricles of the brain. However, if this is correct, there is no reason why this organ should turn out to have an immensely complicated internal composition.

It will be fun to see where these insights lead.

Photo by David Orban

During a recent colloquium I attended, Alisa Carse warned that biomedical technologies increasingly offer opportunities to ignore human vulnerability. After I told Vladimir de Thézier about her talk, he asked me to try to identify her as either a left-wing bioconservative or a technoprogressive. Since readers may be unfamiliar with these terms, I will offer an explanation. In the end, I had no good answer to offer to Vladimir’s question.

My own understanding of this distinction comes from Dale Carrico. His distinction between bioconservatism and technoprogressivism relies, as I understand, on his idea of “technoethical pluralism”. Very simply, bioconservatism happens when private moral belief ascription is employed to do the work of political belief ascription. Presumably, technoprogressivism is good because it keeps politics with politics and relegates morals and aesthetics to an arm’s length distance, to be enjoyed in situations that do not demand purely political protocols. Bioconservatism and variants of uncritical technophilia, like transhumanism, allegedly fail to do that. Read the rest of this entry »

Lawrence Lessig appeared at the top floor of the National Press Club building in Washington on Thursday to launch the first phase of Change Congress. I listened directly in front of him in the front row, and I was pleased to see all of the tech geeks who showed up for his talk, because they have a lot of untapped political power.

For me, the most crucial part of Lessig’s presentation was his argument that in Congressional elections, procedural matters trump policy ideas: In his mind, voters would do well to focus not on specific policy proposals of candidates, but rather whether or not candidates

• reject contributions from registered lobbyists or political action committees,
• support the abolition of earmarks,
• support reform to increase transparency in Congress,
• and support public financing of public elections.

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A lot of people want to be both correct and powerful. Rational selfhood and sovereign statehood comprise, together, a highly seductive intellectual and political objective. This most perfect union, joining veracity to supremacy, is the most alluring of all fantasies: a self whose single voice (for a self can, it is supposed, only have one) regularly speaks the truth, and whose identity abides unfailingly in a national state whose power prevails decisively, universally. Many of the most creative and dramatic projects since classical antiquity have emerged from these complementary aspirations. This helps to explain, for instance, striking parallels between political and ethical reasoning in the Enlightenment — as evidenced in the similarities (noted by Arjun Appadurai) in the Treaty of Westphalia and Immanuel Kant’s work on moral rationality.

My thoughts for the day.

I woke up late this morning and glanced at the dozens of entries on Dale Carrico’s blog I have been too busy to read. I then discovered this gem from last month, in which Dale pondered a “neuroethical analogue to the eugenics movement”, which he inventively calls, “euneurics”. Read the rest of this entry »

Here are some events in Washington I’m looking forward to, or hoping to attend, this semester.

• 11 March, Tuesday: Talk about Walt Whitman’s works
• 15 March, Saturday: Center for Digital Imaging Arts open house at the Foundry Building, 1055 Thomas Jefferson Street, Northwest Washington, 10:00 to noon
• 15 March, Saturday: Interplay of Art and Science at the House of Sweden
• 17 March, Monday: Take Back America 2008
• 18 March, Tuesday: Talk about human dignity with the President’s Council on Bioethics, featuring President DeGioia, Edmund Pellegrino, Madison Powers, and others at Georgetown University’s Riggs Library from 10:30 to 12:00
• 27 March, Thursday: Meet Teresa Hubbard and Alexander Birchler
• 29 March, Saturday: Cherry Blossom Festival
• 02 April, Wednesday: Nonprofit Career Fair
• 03 April, Thursday: Reception and 8th Annual Sackler Lecture, National Academy of Sciences, C Street entrance, 2100 C Street Northwest, 16:40 to 19:00
• (04 April, Friday: Take the Graduate Record Examination at noon)
• 05 April, Saturday: S.T.S. conference
• 06 April, Sunday: La cetra amorosa, National Gallery of Art, 18:00
• 08 April, Tuesday: The Future of Human Rights, 12:30
• 11 April, Friday: Realism and the Next U.S. President, 13:30 to 18:30
• 12 April, Saturday: Dietrich Neumann on the illuminated building
• 16 April, Wednesday: The Bridge at the Edge of the World

My sister Mary Elizabeth suggested I should check out the Hirshhorn Museum on the National Mall. I finally made it out there today, and what I found is one of the most fantastic exhibits I have ever witnessed.

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