Weird and Wonderful World
This wired, interconnected world of ours is amazing. I am writing this from New York, where I've just eaten supper. I had lunch in Charlotte, breakfast in Jacksonville, and I'll wake up tomorrow in Dublin. I've got a wireless daypass, which means I can surf the web in these airports. I have a Skype headset, which means I can chat to friends in Europe and New York.
But what really gets me is how easy and accessible these things are. I was given my headset for free, and Skyping people the world over costs precisely zero dollars. I say I have a wireless daypass, but the fact of the matter is that in neither Jacksonville nor Charlotte did I have to pay to use the airport's internet (and it seems that, by some fluke of the system, I'm on for free here in New York, too--though I don't think that's supposed to happen). It's not just possible for me to call Dublin to confirm flight times--without a phone, from an airport--but it's free.
Of course I had to buy my wireless-enabled laptop, and I had to hang out near an expat cafe in the city (where Skype was giving away free headsets), but these particular services still really do cost nothing. I didn't buy my laptop in order to chat every once-in-a-blue-moon when I'm having a long day of traveling.
And of course, the travelling isn't free. (In fact, given the decline of the dollar, international travel is insanely expensive.) But it still never ceases to amaze me. How the ancient Greeks--or even the colonial Americans--would have been stunned to see our cell phones, satellites, airplanes, and internet!
I'm stunned, too.
The Value of Money
Unusual Sign the American Economy is Going Down the Tubes: Last Thursday, the U.S. Mint
banned people from melting down their pennies and nickels. Given the price of metals on the open market, a new penny is now worth 1.12 cents, pre-192 pennies are worth 2.04 cents, and nickels are worth 6.99 cents. (Note that it costs more than this to
make a penny; this is just the market-value of the copper and zinc (and it's the same with the nickel - 6.99 cents is the fair market value of the nickel.) Making a coin also requires paying for the shaping, melting, setting, and stamping that go into the whole deal, of course.) People are also banned from exporting the coins (because, obviously, somebody in Nefarious Foreign Country X could melt them down perfectly legally), though this has some
practical exceptions for tourists and pneumismatists (and banks?). Now you tell me that if this keeps up there won't be a black market in United States coinage.
Surely the whole point of money is that it is a convenient
proxy for a thing of inherent worth, not a way to artificially legislate that something inherently worthy... well... isn't.
If you go to
www.coinflation.com, you can get a live tracking of the inherent value of coins currently in circulation.
Thinking about this stuff is really quite an interesting exercise. That's because, for money to work efficiently, we have to pretend that it doesn't
have any inherent worth. This is an illusion, of course, and it's an illusion that financiers take advantage of all the time (even without melting coins--all they have to do is a bit of exchange rate arbitrage to show that money is itself valuable.*)
But, when I go to spend a nickel (or, more practically, a greenback), I never keep it in my pocket because of the worth of its constituent parts--
and that's the idea. This is not the same as a claim about inflation. It might well be that my nickel doesn't go as far these days, and so I am more careful about how I spend it--but then, I'm hanging on to it because I'd rather spend it on product X instead of product Y, and it no longer is worth enough
in the market to buy both X and Y together. But that's a different scenario. What I'm talking about is the kind of scenario where I say, "Look, I could pay for this $4 item with four one-dollar bills--but I'd be willing to give you 200 pennies instead." Nobody ever thinks that the 200 pennies would be a better deal. Why? Because the penny is a proxy for 1/100 of a dollar. That's the whole purpose of the penny--to stand in some relationship to money itself, to allow us to easily exchange our work and worth for our things (and for other peoples' works).
But if you really think about it, if those were old-style pennies, at 2.04 cents-on-the-dollar, you'd really rather have those penny rolls. And that's a bit screwy.
It seems counterintuitive to want your money to be inherently worth
less, but in fact, it seems to me that that worthlessness is ennabling. It keeps people from hoarding what is, essentially, an instrument of exchange (unless, of course, they want to be able to exchange it for something else in the future). If we do hoard dollars, it's not because we want the paper they're printed on; we hoard them because we're going to buy that yacht in ten years' time, or because we think inflation is going to fall and they'll be able to buy more stuff tomorrow, or for some other reason that actually has to do with the economy and not the dollar bill.
This makes me optimistic about the cyber-economy.
*Exchange rate arbitrage: a simple concept that people like to pretend is complicated. Let's say I have 10 US Dollars. Here in New York, I can buy 1,200 Japanese Yen for 10 Dollars. Well, in Tokyo, perhaps I can buy 6 British Pounds for 1,200 Yen. And back in New York (or in London, or Chicago, or wherever at all), maybe I can buy 12 Dollars for 6 Pounds. Voila! I have just made Two Dollars, a rather ridiculously high return for rather ridiculously little risk. (Oh, and yes, of course we can buy currency--it's what you do when you go to the foreign exchange window when you get off the plane in Paris, it's what companies do when they need to pay producers in a foreign country, and it's what banks do when they want to hold their reserves in stable dollars or when they need to cover massive withdrawals in a different currency.)
This takes the cake.
New York has just passed a ban on trans fats. I'm having philosophical troubles as a result.
I'm all for a reasonable amount of health-consciousness, but I just can't quite stomach the idea of the government dictating what I am allowed to
eat when I go out. (I can't stomach it! Get it? I'm so funny.) In a nation formed with deference to Liberty and Freedom--instead of, say, universal health care (not that the welfare state is a bad model, mind you, but it is a
different model)--this strikes me as quite an intrusion.
And it's different even from the oft-maligned no-smoking-in-public-establishments laws (with which, frankly, I have no problem). We ban smoking in commercial establishments because we are worried about how one person's carcinogen will affect another person's lungs. This is an extension, albeit a very great extension, of the ban on murder: sure, it limits your freedoms, but it does so in order to protect that guy standing next to you. The same concept informs all sorts of socially responsible legislation: pollution laws, public drunkenness laws, gun laws at a stretch. We limit what you can do because we are worried about the harm it will cause others.
But no amount of stretching makes it reasonable to ban me from publicly eating foods that are bad for me. If I like my flans nice and fluffy (that is, made with shortening) instead of densely rock-like (made with trans fat-free butter), I kind of think that should be my call.
There are all sorts of things a health-conscious legislature can do to make sure that I'm not accidentally jeopardizing my own well-being when I bite into my flan, too. It could force all restaurants to publish ingredients lists. It could run a public campaign explaining the dangers of trans fats and telling us which foods contain them. It could give tax breaks to restaurants that don't serve trans fats, or could institute a sin tax on those who do. I'd stand by any of those moves as well within the prerogative of the government (even if, separate from that issue, I might find some of them a bit silly). In fact, enabling the transfer of information really seems like an ideal government project, allowing me to make my own choices in that much more confident a way.
But banning the public serving of, say, Crisco-laced biscuits? Oh, come
on. That sounds awfully like a Big Daddy State to me.
There is, of course, some real public justification for this move. Obesity in America is a true problem. Moreover, your health issues very well might affect me: if you have a heart attack and are on Medicare, or welfare, or Family Health Plus (
New York's free health insurance for anybody who is 1. uninsured and 2. too rich for Medicaid), then my tax dollars are subsidizing your hospital stay. Your good health is good for my wallet.
But somehow, I think that basic universal health care is compatible with the preservation of a person's ability to do what she wants when it causes neither mental nor bodily harm to another.
Maybe what I mean is this: a higher financial cost to me--that is, slightly higher taxes--seem a worthy price to pay for the assurance that I mostly get to be in charge of my own decisions in life. It's one of the most desirable government expenditures I can think of, in fact. If your gastronomic choices had a 40% chance of giving me cancer, or if they predictably caused me serious mental anguish, then I'd say "legislate them away!" without much hesitation. But there is an essential tradeoff between the individual and the community. If the communal costs of this bit of individual choice are mostly financial, then I have to say that we privilege a person's ability to eat what they enjoy, cooked how they enjoy it.
I'm generally in favor of ensuring collective welfare through our governments--and I think, as a result, that things like Social Security and universal health care are broadly good. But, what can I say, I do detect in myself some strong libertarian tendencies when it comes to messing with the menus of my favorite restaurants. I maintain, perhaps ridiculously, that this is not a double standard.
L'homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers. Peut-être ils sont les chaînes d'une ignorance inculte et stupide, heeuuu?
I've been reading Rousseau lately--not
The Social Contract, which it seems that everybody reads at sometime or another, but
Emile, which I first encountered when I was a freshman in high school. I didn't read it then, but I recently encountered an unglamorous Everyman's Library copy of that text in my grandfather's library, and I remembered the old intention to read it. My grandfather generously gifted the book to me.
Let me say two things upfront, for those of you who may not be familiar with either the book or its author. First,
Emile is primarily a discourse on education, a hypothetical educational project in which Rousseau explains the best way to teach a child so that he grows into a self-aware, happy man. Second, Rousseau himself is a right bastard: sexist, racist, and full of himself to boot. This is not obvious from
The Social Contract (or at least, I don't remember it much in that work), but it is clear as a bell in
Emile This does not make any of his educational ideas self-evidently false.
But there is something else that I dislike about Rousseau's
weltenschuang (if one can appropriately mix the French and the German here)--something that I dare say is a bit more intellectual and a bit more to the substance of Rousseau's educational claims. Fundamentally, I really just don't like philosophies (and theologies) which privilege innocence, the "state of nature," and stupidity (not that their proponents would use that word, of course). Rousseau is the creator of the "Noble Savage." He is perhaps best known, in this day and age, for his declaration, "Man is born free, yet is everywhere in chains." His educational program consists, primarily, of shielding the child from the "corrupting influence" of other people and the things that they have created in this world; he suggests that we should not force a child to learn, but rather that, by secretly controlling everything from his friendships to the activities which he witnesses, we will create a world in which the child decides he is interested in "the right" things, and then chooses to learn about them on his own.
But I don't buy it. Of course it is desirable for a child--or an adult, for that matter--to be interested in the world and eager to learn things about it. But Rousseau's Noble Savage idea is a direct descendent of the Church's weird privileging of innocence and ignorance (consider the ideal state in the Garden of Eden: very, very like the state of Rousseau's ideal modern man). The problem with both of these conceptions is the idea that
growing up, becoming a mature, well-educated, industrious, sexually desirable and desirous
adult, is taken to be a bad thing. For both Rousseau and the church against which he so often thinks he is arguing, experience distances one from the ideal (whether we style that ideal as "savage freedom" or "Godly innocence not yet sullied by our inevitable human failings"). For Rousseau, education consists in giving a boy enough self-knowledge that his natural virtues overpower the corrupting and unhappy ways of the other people that he will meet when he is an adult.
Rousseau takes this to be a claim about freedom and happiness. His educational program is geared towards letting a child choose his own interests from the beginning, and stumbling and having to work through his own (albeit child-sized) hardships (even suggesting that it is better that a child be allowed to make his own mistakes and die in the process than to have him grow into an adult who did not have the same liberty-filled education). A self-directed life like this is, for Rousseau, the only truly happy life. So, while at the beginning we only give the child the perpetual
illusion of choice while simultaneously carefully controlling all the aspects of the world he sees, later on the man benefits from always doing that which he is naturally predisposed to do, and by acting in harmony with his desires instead of getting sucked into doing what other people think is important.
In a world where there is prestige in the acquisition of things we neither particularly want or need, in which we let magazines tell us we are too fat or too ugly or too sexually incapable, in which people with all the luxuries they could want are chronically depressed and engage in all sorts of self-harm, what Rousseau says is somewhat compelling. He might be right that people are unhappy and unfulfilled in life if we do not have full moral control over our selves; he might be right that psychological pressure is the source of many of our gravest ills; he might be right that we ought to reconsider what we mean when we say that we are "free."
But Rousseau is naive to think we can escape society in the way that he suggests. He wants to educate Emile to be an individual among men - but he runs into deep and untenable difficulties when he considers love and marriage, for example. (He decides, ultimately, that the only way for Emile to continue to act as an individual is to have his wife act always according to his will, as an extension of himself: "The whole education [of women] ought to be relative to men. To please them, to be useful to them, to make themselves loved and honored by them, to educate them when young, to care for them when grown, to counsel them, to console them and to make life agreeable and sweet to them--these are the duties of women at all times." Note that this is not just an unconsidered sexism; Rousseau has written himself into a wall, strongly privileging the family unit but also placing as his first goal the absolute autonomy of his student, and that man's ability to always act freely on his desires. If Emile must always be able to make free choices, and if he is also to be able to live a life with somebody else, then it follows that she's going to have to always go along with his choices.) Rousseau finds himself in a tight spot when he dismisses everything but practical education, too, suggesting that for their own benefit all children should learn a manual trade so that they can work and be their own bosses--but this at the same time deprives society of everything from firefighters to doormen. And Rousseau doesn't even consider the possibility of the occasional failure of socialization under his progam; his entire scheme rests on the assumption that a child will on his own choose to have principles which are broadly compatible with the principles and values of the society which he will grow up to join. But what if he never wants to study basic math? What if he takes pleasure in hurting animals? What if he just learns to kill his own food--a perfectly morally defensible position, yes, but perhaps not if he later lives in an American suburb and takes this to mean that he should strangle the pigeons and shoot the dogs.
And this is precisely the problem. Rousseau pretends he wants his child to learn about himself and to discover his own desires, but in fact he wants the child to discover on his own the desires of the society away from which he is being diligently kept by his loving parents. In the meantime, he may well be discovering a great many natural principles on his own, but he is also being deprived of much of what we know, and of the kind of rigor with which we come to know things well. It may not be pleasant to memorize verb conjugations or to study the laws of physical motion (though it might be), but it is effective--and it is by doing the hard intellectual work of learning (at whatever level) that we come to know something well. Experts are made, not born.
Moreover, knowledge is progressive. The idea that a child should start from scratch when we already know so much seems to me at best ignorant and at worst immoral. The reason we teach what we know is that we already
know it. A man might feel a sense of accomplishment when he invents the wheel, but surely that's nothing more than an illusion if in fact the wheel has already been around for millenia. Better to teach the man about kinetics and let him undertake a real accomplishment, let him invent a real new thing.
And better to grant that the relationships we make, the things we learn, the education we foster, is a good thing representative of very real and very desirable growth and maturity--rather than a continuous progression away from the ideal of self-centered desire fulfillment. For if it is instead the latter of these two options, then surely the prescription must be to stop our social interaction, our education, and, in the final estimation, our life as a respectable, caring, productive human being. In the final estimation, this is a philosophy neither of hope nor of happiness.
And besides all that, the whole darned program is entirely impractical and impossible to implement anyhow. I find that reassuring, I confess.
