Augustus Lowell

American Malaise…?

March 5, 2023March 13, 2023 by Augustus Lowell

In the interest of completing the set — not to be the curmudgeon who laments about “…in my day…” or “…you don’t know how good you have it!”, but merely to remind people that this, too, shall pass — I have been thinking about what things were like in 1980, the year I graduated from high-school and began my journey into adulthood. We were, for example, the last generation for whom the moon landing, Watergate, and Vietnam were all memories of experience rather than history learned from books. But, we were also a generation who came of age in what was widely described, at the time, as a period of malaise…

In 1980…

First, Do No Harm

February 20, 2023March 1, 2023 by Augustus Lowell

What is it that makes someone “worth” voting for? Or not?

My primary answer — where I place the essential boundary — comes from the formal ethics developed for the practice of medicine — another discipline that, like democratic government, is supposed to be all about improving things for people subject to its practice:

First, do no harm!

A huge number of people — essentially everyone on the left, but also all the “never Trumpers” (count me among them) and, now, many “used-to-be Trumpers” — see Trump as immutably harmful. Their common argument is, “You must vote against Trump (and against his Trump-lite Republican acolytes) because he is actively dangerous. Anything is better than that!

And, there is a lot of truth in that position — but, only a lot of truth, not complete truth. It may be conditionally true, but it is not fundamentally true. It does not represent The Truth.

For, many people — not only ‘conservatives’ but, also, those on the ‘center right’ (like me) and on much of the ‘center’ left — would say that there are plenty of Democrats who could and would, in their own fashions, also actively cause a ruinous harm if we were to hand them the reins of power.

Guns and Gun Control

February 16, 2023February 26, 2023 by Augustus Lowell

A few highlights: click through for the full discussion…

People who value free speech object vociferously and in absolutist terms to any suggestion that anyone have any authority to censor anything. Why? Because they fear – and justifiably so – that a large fraction of the people who say they want “reasonable” authority to censor things are not actually reasonable. They fear that talk of “reasonable” limits on speech is disingenuous and offered in bad faith. They fear that people who talk of “reasonable” limits on speech actually have much more extreme limits in mind, if they could only achieve them; and that their push for “reasonable” limits are intended merely as a starting salvo in a longer battle to ban speech outright (or, at least, to ban outright any speech they disagree with, which is effectively the same thing).

People who value access to abortion object vociferously and in absolutist terms to any suggestion that anyone have any authority to limit such access at any time and under any circumstances. Why? Because they fear – and justifiably so – that a large fraction of the people who say they want “reasonable” authority to place constraints on abortion are not actually reasonable. They fear that talk of “reasonable” constraints on abortion is disingenuous and offered in bad faith. They fear that people who talk of “reasonable” constraints on abortion actually have much more extreme limits in mind, if they could only achieve them; and that their push for “reasonable” limits are intended merely as a starting salvo in a longer battle to ban abortion outright.

And, yes. People who value access to guns object vociferously and in absolutist terms to any suggestion that anyone have any authority to limit such access at any time and under any circumstances. Why? Because they fear – and justifiably so – that a large fraction the people who say they want “reasonable” authority to place constraints on gun access are not actually reasonable. They fear that talk of “reasonable” constraints on guns is disingenuous and offered in bad faith. They fear that people who talk of “reasonable” constraints on guns actually have much more extreme limits in mind, if they could only achieve them; and that their push for “reasonable” limits are intended merely as a starting salvo in a longer battle to ban guns outright.

If you want to bring along the sensible, practical people who lament the current state of affairs and, yet, who value their right to have access to guns for self-protection and/or sport, you need to do more than “re-frame” the language and the argument. You need to convince them that you are both sincere and trustworthy.

You are asking them to rein in (or, at least, have the political courage to ignore, or even oppose) the most extreme voices in their coalition. In the same way, you need to convince them that you can effectively rein in (or, at least, have the political courage to ignore, or even oppose) the most extreme voices in your coalition. You need to convince them that the “reasonable” proposals you have in mind really are — truly — your ends, and not merely a means to initiate a march toward something more extreme.

…

It has been a bedrock principle of liberal American justice that people are presumed to be innocent until proven guilty; and it has often been said (typically by those on the “left”) that it is better that ten murderers go free than that one innocent man be unjustly condemned and punished as a murderer. We are exquisitely sensitive to injustice and unfairness. It has, arguably, both instigated and consumed much of our political discourse in recent years.

If we want to pursue policies that try to predict who should not be trusted with exercising legitimate individual prerogatives (like owning guns – or, say, owning cars), we had best design such policies with multiple and nimble levels of appeal and review, with ample opportunities for error correction, and with the onus of the major effort resting on those who would curtail such prerogatives rather than on those who would retain them.

And we had best design them to minimize, as much as possible, false positives.

To be clear: we all need to acknowledge that it is unreasonable and implausible to expect we can define a system that generates no false positives at all. Gun rights enthusiasts just need to come to grips with that fact: any system that is effective enough to be useful in reducing the carnage is going to sweep a few innocents into its net.

But, the alternative is what we have now: far too many other innocents being swept into the net of gun mayhem. That is unacceptable.

Yes, there is a price to be paid for freedom. But, news flash for the gun crowd: not being shot in your classroom or at the supermarket or while playing on your front stoop is also a kind of freedom, and arguably more fundamental than a right to own a gun. We need to be willing to pay the price to protect that freedom, as well.

That said, people who want to enact various gun-related policies (and many other “progressive” policies) also need to acknowledge something: that restrictions on liberty, of any kind and no matter how “reasonable”, do, indeed, come with costs as well as benefits – yes, immediate human costs but, also, through legislative/legal precedent and an induced cultural complacency about such restrictions in principle, long-term systemic costs as well. The fact that the short-term, human costs are not ones that you, yourself, care about or will pay, or that the long-term systemic costs seem distant and abstract or are not ones you can imagine or lament, does not mean they don’t exist or are unimportant.

If you want cooperation from people who will bear those costs, you need at least to acknowledge them, and to acknowledge that building in safeguards to minimize those costs is a reasonable and beneficial part of any such policy. Insisting – as many on the “left” do – that concern about those costs is irrational or illegitimate – or, worse, is depraved and malevolent – is guaranteed to make cooperation impossible.

…

Being averse to research on “gun violence” is not irrational, for the reasons of trust cited above: the people calling for and performing such research are, in far too many cases, doing so in bad faith. Calling for research on “gun violence” is a nearly certain sign that the proposed “research” is not actually about science: it isn’t aimed at investigating and understanding root causes; and it isn’t aimed at testing a variety of hypotheses. Rather, it is aimed narrowly at proving a specific hypothesis: that “Guns cause violence (and should, therefore, be banned).”

That is poor science because it presumes the result it is purported to be researching.

More importantly, that is poor science because it is overtly political – it implies that the “research” is not as much intended to expand the boundaries of knowledge as it is to manufacture justifications for pasting a “scientific” patina onto a pre-determined policy preference. It is, all too often, advocacy disguised as science. It would be like proposing research narrowly focused on “Black criminality” or on “The cognitive bases for gender disparities”. There may be real-world observational evidence that those things exist. But, we can and would probably safely assume that anyone proposing such narrowly-defined “research” had some agenda in mind beyond the simple advancement of human wisdom.

Yes, by all means, let us research the nature and sources of violence and what might be done about it. But, don’t limit our focus to one specific tool. Ask, rather: what is it about our culture (including, but not limited to, “gun culture”) that breeds such solipsism and lack of empathy? Ask, rather: what is it about our culture that fails to discourage people from acting out that solipsism, from inflicting it on others? Ask, rather: what is it about our culture that so consistently fails to instill in its citizenry a respect for other people and a reverence for the Golden Rule? And what can we do about that?

…

I would venture that the “framing” I identified – that people who want to be able to use guns thereby assume a responsibility for ensuring that all gun use is responsible gun use – may be the key to engaging with those who value access to guns. Because, if we can turn the conversation from “rights” to “responsibilities” – if we can turn the conversation from “how we plan to impose our coercion upon you” to “how we expect you to step up and do the right thing” – the rest of the conversation will be immeasurably easier.

Perhaps, if we can find a way to turn our conversation about guns toward the duties of responsibility, rather than making it an argument about rights and regulation, we can not only make progress on guns but, then, extend that approach to politics and governance beyond guns into all the other subjects that currently divide us.

…

It occurs to me that perhaps the most effective policy for controlling gun violence would actually be to require any gun that can accept an external ammunition clip — which is a reasonably good proxy for its potential high-volume/long-term rate of fire — to be colored hot pink and fitted with a grip shaped like a phallus.

It would have no effect on the gun’s performance or its availability. But, slinging a giant pink penis over your shoulder or strapping a giant pink penis to your hip to carry it around, or wrapping your hand around a giant pink penis in order to aim and shoot, would simply not look macho or cool. It would not be photogenic. It would not project an automatic aura of menace and authority. It would, to the contrary, be rather emasculating. It would indeed, make you look silly.

That would somewhat clarify exactly why it is that people think they need such firepower — it would tend to separate those who have some genuine need for a tool with that kind of performance from those whose primary need is actually for a brace to prop up their sagging self-esteem.

A crisis of masculinity?

October 7, 2022February 24, 2023 by Augustus Lowell

I noted a long time ago that one thing conspicuously missing from most modern (or, at least modern Western) societies is any kind of cultural test and/or ritual to mark the passage from childhood into adulthood. Such rituals were (as I recollect — from reading about them, not from personal experience) a common part of most pre-modern cultures.

…

Without those formal rites-of-passage, young people can easily pass from childhood into adulthood with no self-demonstration of their worth in themselves and their value to the community, with no acknowledgement of that value from the community, and, all-too-often, without any clear sense of what their role in the community is or ought to be and without any confidence that they can fulfill it.

Making that worse, my sense is that modern Western culture has, for a long time, been systematically and inexorably “communalizing”.

As part of that, we have culturally de-emphasized and de-valued autonomy, independence, personal prowess, courage, and competition — precisely the ‘masculine’ qualities that have aligned with our historical cultural views of male-gender roles and, arguably, with basic human male psychology and physiology; and we have emphasized and prized the collective, inter-dependence, emotional dexterity, tenacity, and cooperation — precisely the ‘feminine’ qualities that have aligned with our historical cultural views of female-gendered roles and, arguably, aligned with basic human female psychology and physiology.

Is it any wonder that leaves men adrift?

Deterrence

October 1, 2022December 26, 2022 by Augustus Lowell

Regarding W.F. Buckley’s musing on whether or not, in the end, Ronald Reagan would actually have given the order to launch our nuclear response, I must point out that such ambiguity was always at the heart of the policy of Mutual Assured Destruction — that it is, in fact and by its nature, at the heart of any strategy of deterrence.

For deterrence to be successful requires two elements that must both be present:

- That your opponent believes you have the capability to retaliate
- That your opponent believes you have the will to retaliate (including the will to depend on retaliation, rather than backing down)

Note that neither element requires that your threat be ‘real’ — that is, that you actually have the capability in the first instance and that you actually have the will in the second. What matters is that you can make your opponent believe both are real.

From the Archive: Road Etiquette

September 26, 2022October 9, 2022 by Augustus Lowell

From the letters I’ve read, it seems those on the side of slowing down, including Mr. Roadshow himself, have done a good job of stating the case and describing what we speed-freaks should not be doing; I would like to propose a few rules of thumb for the slowpokes, from the other perspective:

- If there are cars lined up behind you and open road in front of you, it’s a good bet that you are impeding the flow of traffic, so let them go by.
- If you are in the passing lane and the lane to your right is empty, you are in the wrong place.
- If you are in the passing lane and going the same speed as the car to your right, you have created a rolling roadblock; either pull ahead or fall behind, but move over.
- Many of our freeways have three or more lanes, and people are in the habit of cruising along in the middle, leaving a lane to pass on the left and avoiding the entering and exiting traffic on the right. That is fine — but, during carpool hours, the left lane is off-limits to most drivers, and the center lane is the de-facto passing lane; please treat it as such!

Why is “the right” so hostile to “climate change”?

July 10, 2022December 26, 2022 by Augustus Lowell

The American “right” latched onto an “anti-climate change” attitude — and took that to the ridiculous extreme of being proof-of-membership-in-the-group — in large measure as a direct response to the early (and, alas, continuing) attitudes of the American “left” toward the subject.

From the earliest discussions of the potential for climate change and what we might do about it, the left succeeded in tying “climate change” nearly inextricably to “highly coercive and disruptive government mandated emergency command-and-control remedies”.

In that environment, there was simply no way to be both ‘conservative’ and accepted as someone who took climate change seriously. You were either wildly progressive or you were a “denier”. As far as the green left and the media that echoed its talking points was concerned, there was nothing, and no room for anything, in between.

To the extent that the “left” succeeded in transforming “climate change” from a legitimate scientific and policy debate into merely another excuse for getting what it had always wanted anyway and for other reasons — a self-righteous justification for telling us all how to live our lives coupled to yet more coercive authority concentrated in the hands of politicians and government bureaucrats (to be guided, of course, by academic intellectuals) — it did mean that the opposition from the “right” to “climate change” was much more about opposing that coercive policy agenda than it was about the science, itself.

The Post-“Dobbs” Dread

June 27, 2022February 24, 2023 by Augustus Lowell

In reading today’s post-“Dobbs” news stories and opinion pieces, I am somewhat reminded of the environment following the 2000 election of George W. Bush and the genuine sense of panic that was in the air.

Musings on Abortion

May 7, 2022August 30, 2022 by Augustus Lowell

Apropos of the big news of this week — the leak of what is presumed to be the Supreme Court’s position (if only in draft form) that it will overturn Roe vs. Wade and return the issue of abortion to the state legislatures — here are some excerpts from the chapter on Abortion in my book, American Conservative — Reclaiming Conservatism From the Right (2016).

A snippet from the conclusion:

An embryo or fetus with the higher cerebral functions not yet engaged – pre-sentient and without the consciousness from which may eventually emerge self-awareness and free will – has the potential to become human not the quintessence of humanity. In my areligious worldview, with no faith in some revealed and ancient catechism to instruct me on whether or not a soul exists independent of corporeal sentience and on when such a soul might manifest, I cannot justify surrendering to government unfettered authority over a palpable liberty that already exists in the defense of some ineffable essence that may yet come to be.

And yet, I must agree with the religious conservatives – not out of any theological insight but out of a humanist and libertarian respect for human dignity – that such potential for ineffable essence has value. And, therefore, I equally cannot countenance the view that discarding such potential is an act utterly without moral import. Nor can I countenance the view, extreme but seemingly common on the far “left” and particularly among the feminist fringe, that such ineffable essence somehow suddenly and miraculously materializes at the emergence from the birth canal and not an instant before.

It seems clear, to me at least, that at some point, after the cerebral cortex begins functioning and prior to full-term birth, the potential of a human fetus transforms into the quintessence of a human baby. It seems equally clear that by exercising one choice – to carry a pregnancy to that point of quintessence – a woman, herself, circumscribes other choices including, in particular, the choice to have an abortion thereafter.