Political Correctness

I’ve experienced lately the distress of “being nibbled to death by mice.”  That’s what an old friend at the office used to call those days when the big things you want to do get overtaken by a multitude of little things that just won’t wait.  One of the things I’d rather have worked on lately has been writing, but there’s been no time.  The mice of January “must do’s” leave no room for excuses, lacking even the empathy of a rat.   I regret that, but it does bring to mind interesting news on the science front.

Recent scientific studies show that rats care about the distress of other rats.  In a study reported in the Washington Post, researchers report that the distress is a product of mammalian socialization, not genetics specific to rats.  That is, all species that raise babies have the capability to respond to distress in others of their species, since babies could not survive if their parent did not respond to their signs of distress.  It is the fundamental building block of empathy, and all mammals possess some degree of it.  Response only to similar members of the same species, such as similarly colored neighbors, is a trained trait learned in childhood.  So, where did Libertarians, with their “cheerful indifference to the needs of others” go wrong?  For, as an example, to a scientist, indifference to the distress of a neighbor much like you who is long-term unemployed is clearly not in accord with natural instinct, but an acquired trait.  It requires refusing to recognize the neighbor as having common human traits.  How, and why, did Libertarians learn to go against natural instinct?  It brings to mind Colbert’s comment that “Reality has a Liberal bias.”  The scientist would probably agree.

The Libertarian might argue that I’m just being “politically correct”, and there’s truth in that.  But what is political correctness in the first place?  Scientific correctness is straight-forward.  A fundamental assumption of science is that there is a “correct” relationship between cause and effect. Smash an atom with an x-ray beam and it will fission, not melt; expose a conditioned dog to the sound of a bell, and it will salivate, not scratch its ear and yawn.  Politics is based on an opposite premise, that there is no “one” correct way to proceed but many, subject to negotiations between parties with differing views and interests.  That in fact is what liberty is all about, the ability to view things in different ways.  We cherish our liberty, and would not want to give it up, even when it requires letting other people be loudly and disastrously wrong-headed.  Libertarians may be going against nature, but they have the right to do so.  That is our true national political correctness, and we remain proud of it.

The problem nowadays is that our views on liberty were developed in a time when all political causes and effects were local, and the world was much less complex.  No one best way was fine in a village argument over locating the school house, but when you’re dealing with the consequences of global climate change or education for a high-tech world economy or the impacts of cross-breeding species of food crops through genetic engineering, it’s a different matter.  There are “best” ways, there are usually severe time-constraints for effective action, ignoring them can be disastrous for billions of people, and finding them requires analysis by experts and willingness to follow uncomfortable courses.  Scientific and political correctness clash head-on.

We've already solved the problem in the financial sector, the one we seem to find the most important. In the U.S. we established the Federal Reserve System, and elsewhere they had already had central banks for many years.  That amounted to delegating to experts the manipulation of the flow of money trough the national economy to avoid debilitating controversy and stalemates arising from the differing interests of all the parties involved.  Climate change and education would seem to be at least as important.  An argument often made against such delegation of major decisions to boards of experts is that it breeds conformity and wide-spread “political correctness”, but it’s hard to spot that as a consequence of the Federal Reserve. Another argument is that expert decisions requiring taxation for funding take your money without your voice, taxation without representation.  But decisions by the Federal Reserve can raise or lower your income dramatically, and we never seem to notice.

The fundamental argument is that each delegation to experts constitutes a lessening of individual liberty.  That’s a substantive argument, and the consequences of ignoring it can be seen in totalitarian regimes like the former USSR or Communist China, where boards of experts planned everything from factory quotas to the number of children you could have.  A creeping conformity can in fact overwhelm whole nations in disastrous ways.  But your liberty ends at the tip of another person's nose, and here we're counting billions of noses.  And there are correct ways to proceed. As it stands, we are simply using individual experts as weapons to cudgel opponents rather than collecting and using effectively the consensus of the entire scientific community.  A delegation to  a board of experts by Congress in specific areas like climate change or genetic engineering, with their conclusions accepted or rejected In Toto, would seem to address that concern.  

We live in a complex and dangerous world where major choices must be made and implemented correctly and quickly.  It is disastrously outdated to think those choices can be made as in olden times, around the village elm with the decision going to those who can talk loudest and longest.  The world will not wait for our decisions.