Thursday, March 23, 2006
A note on life expectancy
I just saw a graph of how female life expectancy has increased steadily over time, passing points at which it was predicted to stop and level out without wavering. However, it seems the truth may be more complicated. Life expectancy is generated by a mean of years lived. Part of the reason that such large increases have happened is not because we have vastly increased the maximum age of death. After all, the bible, two thousand years ago, sets our span at threee score years and ten, yet we regularly speak of mediaeval life expectancies in the forties. What we have really changed is not death in old age, but deaths associated with birth. Child mortality massively skews any mean -- obviously, if lots of children die at birth, that will pull down enormously any average of lifespan across the population. Equally, fewer women now die in childbirth, which, as an event occuring relatively early in life, especially in historical times and especially in cases where the risk factors are higher, also pulled down the statistics. So we must be very careful in seeing a rise in life expectancy as proof that we are doing a lot to extend the lifespan overall. What we have done is let more people live out their biblical span. Of course, if we wanted to be gloomy, we could also argue that given how statistics have in the past been skewed by child mortality, they ought now to include abortions and infanticide. It would be interesting to see how that would affect mean life expectancy, especially given that abortions in Russia exceed live births and female infanticide in Asia is reported to have been widespread in recent decades. The claim might have to shift from, 'we have done wonders for the lifespan,' to 'the individuals who die now do so without suffering'. Which is an achievement of sorts, but not at all the one we currently celebrate.
Transhumanism: most dangerous idea in the world?
Nick Bostrom, from Oxford University's new Future of Humanity Institute, gave a lecture at the RSA last night on the possibility of transhumanism. He puts it this way: curing all cancer and heart disease won't add even ten years to the mean human lifespan, despite taking huge research projects. Delaying or curtailing aging could make a difference on a different scale of magnitude altogether. Also, consider the relatively small tweaks that seem to have taken a chimp-like primate to a planet-conquering hominid. He asks if there are more such tweaks that can be made, and suggests we would be mad not to try. Francis Fukuyama, by contrast, (he of 'The End of History') has called this the most dangerous idea in the world, because of its potential to divide humanity, joined by an indefinable x-factor of human-ness, into tribes of superior and lesser kinds, after the manner of Brave New World, or the false scientific racism that interested the Nazis so much. Unclear that this would happen, because the danger would come from engineering sub-humans, not super-humans. If we accept that all humans now pass some threshhold, we would have to re-engineer types that we thought did not. More likely we would progress animals to some intermediate state - superchimps that we could use as servants or send to difficult locations - or robots with AI. Neither case seems worrying in Fukuyama's sense. On the other hand, consider how, while markets in many ways are very effective mechanisms for setting prices, discovering useful information and driving up standards, there are situations where mass choosing seems to arrive at a non-optimal result, precisely in the areas that transhumanism comes to play. Consider control over reproduction. The choice to have a baby or not is a new and powerful one. It has had a very good press for a long time. Now however it is becoming clear in Europe and particularly in Russia where abortions exceed live births that it has produced a continent that cannot sustain its own population. Equally, in China and probably elsewhere too in Asia, the power of parents to select gender (often crudely through infanticide in the face of the one child policy) is producing a population skew, with many more boys than girls born and reared. This seems an obvious worry. The problem is that individual choice seems the only mechanism available. It must be better than control by the state in these intimately personal areas. And outright bans do not seem possible, except as a braking manoeuvre. In fact, looking more closely at the worrying instances given, it says more about how state intervention distorts the marketplace for reproduction than the inability of parental choices to aggregate into social wisdom. Europe's welfare state has made children a bad bargain when you can assume that leaning on someone else's is a possibility. Russia's kleptocratic, anarcho-capitalist, post-commnist malaise has left family integrity battered and broken. China is suffering the law of unintended consequence for a brutally centrist policy. Perhaps the lesson of transhumanism as a foreseeable prospect is that the state needs to get out of the way if individual reproductive choices are not to accumulate, propped up by state support, into unsustainable positions.
Wednesday, March 22, 2006
Hazlitt on liberty
"The love of liberty is the love of others; the love of power is the love of ourselves." -- William Hazlitt
Thursday, March 16, 2006
What does slavery mean?
The great British intervention to end the slave trade, and the great American war that freed its slaves are defining events in Western civilisation. They show the extent of our commitment to freedom, and highlight the power of Christianity in shaping the causes for which we will fight.
But these two great efforts also tend to impose on our thought a definition of slavery that misses some complexity of ancient thought on the subject. The action of British and American militaries was taken against the economic practice of ownership of human beings, the power to trade them and determine the conditions under which they lived. This sense of slavery is utterly horrible, and, it seems, almost endemic in human history. Legitimated by Islam; practised by African chiefs long before the arrival of Western colonisers; powering the Roman empire -- economic, or 'positive' slavery is a horror that continues to dog the world outside the West. Some estimates suggest there are more slaves now than there have ever been. Even within the officially slave-free West there are positive slaves hidden within the black economy of people-smuggling and the sex trade.
Positive slavery seems to be challenge enough for mankind. Yet there is another concept of slavery that is latterly ignored, but was common in the ancient world. This may be called, in contradistinction, 'negative' slavery. This is the idea that certain people (sometimes identified by ethnic group, sometimes by their defeat in battle) are slavekind. That is to say they are naturally slaves. Aristotle says that slaves are not fully human. To the Roman mind, to allow yourself to be beaten in war, to accept slavery, was essentially to prove that you were fit for slavery. The condition of Dhimmitude in Islam, for those outside the faith, is, while not positive slavery, a form of treatment that acknowledges some form of negative slavery inhering in the dhimmi.
Thankfully, the twentieth-century fashion for racial science has passed and no serious effort to characterise whole peoples as inevitably deserving of slavery by nature can now be made. But negative slavery as a trap in which individuals may find themselves despite having the power to escape it, that threat still remains. For what negative slavery recognises is that freedom is only half a gift, and perhaps less than that. It is in the main a prize to be won, to be seized by an individual determined to be free. 'Give me freedom or give me death,' the cry of the American patriot. Or, as it became for some slaves with a bleaker outlook, 'Death or freedom'.
We have forgotten that freedom must be fought for, and have retreated into the cosy idea that it can be handed out by the state. The state may, indeed, outlaw positive slavery. Yet there are surely many in the West who could be considered as negative slaves -- they have votes they do not use, faculties of reason they will not exercise, privileges they have not earnt and will not stand up to defend.
What is the duty of government? Less than many think today. For if government begins in the protection of its citizens from those outsiders who would enslave them positively, it must be careful not to act to enslave negatively those within its own reach. That argues for small government and self-reliance. It argues for freedom as something that must be seized and cannot only be given. Above all, it suggests that the first principle of government should be to work for the individual freedom of its citizens -- from both breeds of slavery. That may mean intervention, as Wilberforce showed. It will also mean knowing where to step aside, and knowing that where you intervene it should be in favour of removing the need to do so.
But these two great efforts also tend to impose on our thought a definition of slavery that misses some complexity of ancient thought on the subject. The action of British and American militaries was taken against the economic practice of ownership of human beings, the power to trade them and determine the conditions under which they lived. This sense of slavery is utterly horrible, and, it seems, almost endemic in human history. Legitimated by Islam; practised by African chiefs long before the arrival of Western colonisers; powering the Roman empire -- economic, or 'positive' slavery is a horror that continues to dog the world outside the West. Some estimates suggest there are more slaves now than there have ever been. Even within the officially slave-free West there are positive slaves hidden within the black economy of people-smuggling and the sex trade.
Positive slavery seems to be challenge enough for mankind. Yet there is another concept of slavery that is latterly ignored, but was common in the ancient world. This may be called, in contradistinction, 'negative' slavery. This is the idea that certain people (sometimes identified by ethnic group, sometimes by their defeat in battle) are slavekind. That is to say they are naturally slaves. Aristotle says that slaves are not fully human. To the Roman mind, to allow yourself to be beaten in war, to accept slavery, was essentially to prove that you were fit for slavery. The condition of Dhimmitude in Islam, for those outside the faith, is, while not positive slavery, a form of treatment that acknowledges some form of negative slavery inhering in the dhimmi.
Thankfully, the twentieth-century fashion for racial science has passed and no serious effort to characterise whole peoples as inevitably deserving of slavery by nature can now be made. But negative slavery as a trap in which individuals may find themselves despite having the power to escape it, that threat still remains. For what negative slavery recognises is that freedom is only half a gift, and perhaps less than that. It is in the main a prize to be won, to be seized by an individual determined to be free. 'Give me freedom or give me death,' the cry of the American patriot. Or, as it became for some slaves with a bleaker outlook, 'Death or freedom'.
We have forgotten that freedom must be fought for, and have retreated into the cosy idea that it can be handed out by the state. The state may, indeed, outlaw positive slavery. Yet there are surely many in the West who could be considered as negative slaves -- they have votes they do not use, faculties of reason they will not exercise, privileges they have not earnt and will not stand up to defend.
What is the duty of government? Less than many think today. For if government begins in the protection of its citizens from those outsiders who would enslave them positively, it must be careful not to act to enslave negatively those within its own reach. That argues for small government and self-reliance. It argues for freedom as something that must be seized and cannot only be given. Above all, it suggests that the first principle of government should be to work for the individual freedom of its citizens -- from both breeds of slavery. That may mean intervention, as Wilberforce showed. It will also mean knowing where to step aside, and knowing that where you intervene it should be in favour of removing the need to do so.
Awkward truths about war /2
“War, Nobby. Huh! What is it good for?” he said.
“Dunno, sarge. Freeing slaves, maybe?”
“Absol-- Well, okay.”
“Defending yourself from a totalitarian aggressor?”
“All right, I'll grant you that, but…”“Saving civilization against a horde of…”
“It doesn't do any good in the long run is what I'm saying, Nobby, if you'd listen for five seconds together,” said Fred Colon sharply.
"Yeah, but in the long run what does, sarge?”
- from 'Thud!' by Terry Pratchett
“Dunno, sarge. Freeing slaves, maybe?”
“Absol-- Well, okay.”
“Defending yourself from a totalitarian aggressor?”
“All right, I'll grant you that, but…”“Saving civilization against a horde of…”
“It doesn't do any good in the long run is what I'm saying, Nobby, if you'd listen for five seconds together,” said Fred Colon sharply.
"Yeah, but in the long run what does, sarge?”
- from 'Thud!' by Terry Pratchett
Awkward truths about war /1
Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight
But Roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right.
- Hilaire Belloc
But Roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right.
- Hilaire Belloc
Wednesday, March 08, 2006
Wednesday, March 01, 2006
Too tasty to firebomb
So Danish pastries are now 'Roses of the Prophet Mohammed' in Iran. Why does the croissant get such a free ride in Europe? It is, after all, the exact antithesis of the rebranded Jihad Pastries. The croissant was created to celebrate the lifting of the siege of Vienna, as the encroaching Islamic armies was turned back from Europe. The croissant is a deliberate, contemptuous insult to a religion that historically is one of Europe's great enemies. The purchaser of a croissant takes a mocking representation of the holy symbol for Religion-o'-Peace(TM) and shoves it into his or her filthy kaffir mouth. Much worse than pointing your foot at someone, you'd think. Maybe banning it or calling it pain au beurre or something anodyne and history-free would stir up to much real history in the process? Or maybe it is just far too tasty to trifle with. Nice to think that even hate-filled zealots can be won round by a good recipe.
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