Within Reason

I haven’t been writing about politics lately because “frustration” is a dramatic understatement of my attitude towards the Obama administration’s domestic policy (and politics). But Matthew Yglesias wrote something yesterday that should be repeated as often as possible:

“…frustrated progressives have fallen into a trap of thinking that the answers to policy questions are more obvious than they really are. In a world awash in right-wing nonsense, it becomes easy to think that the obvious wrongness of the right’s policy prescriptions implies that the correct policy ideas are also obvious. But they’re not! Not at all.”

I think this is right, and sometimes so right that it makes it difficult to discuss policy with people who are “on the same side”, ideologically speaking. (And I’m probably guilty of the same simple-mindedness when it comes to foreign policy.) The healthcare debate was a perfect example. Lots of people on the left thought it was baffling that the Obama administration all but ignored a single-payer solution where the government paid healthcare bills directly, rather than through the middle-man of the health insurance industry. But while I don’t think there’s any argument that a system like that can work well (see, you know, Canada, and Medicare in the US for that matter), it would have been incredibly risky from an economic and political standpoint to simply gut the private health insurance industry. It employs thousands and thousands of people directly and probably at least a million from an indirect standpoint. To tell the industry that its days were numbered, especially in a period of economic collapse, would have been a nightmare. That’s not even counting the massive amount of data the government would have to collect from scratch in order to enroll everyone in the country under 65. I wouldn’t have wanted to count on the newly obsolete insurance industry to just hand over the data.

All this said, I think that while the correct policy ideas are far from obvious, the correct politics often are pretty obvious. Democrats seem cursed with the idea that if the best policy ideas are complex, the best way to sell them has to reflect that complexity. This leads to endless amounts of dithering and poor framing. Supporters end up having to sell the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act” rather than the “Awesome Healthcare for Americans Act”. Instead of claiming that “Republicans want to sabotage economic recovery” and “Real patriots have to sacrifice for the sake of their fellow Americans”, Democrats fan out around the country saying “Now may not really, actually, probably, well-at-least-in-my-opinion be the time to extend tax cuts for people who make more than $250,000 a year — not that those people aren’t part of our economic engine because some of them own small businesses and are really hurting from the recent economic unpleasantness.”

Kansas City’s Shakespeare Festival is putting on Macbeth this summer. For a lot of reasons that put me in more foul a mood than fair, I’ve been reluctant to go near it. But I managed to get myself to one of the pre-show lectures that are going on at my local branch of the Kansas City public library, and of course “the curse” came up. Most people are familiar with the idea that “Shakespeare’s Scottish play” is supposedly cursed. I wouldn’t normally think of it as anything other than a good theater joke, but the weirdness of the summer so far has made it hard to remain too rational. So I was a bit more open the idea.

What a curse is turns out to be far from settled. My computer’s dictionary tells me that it’s a call to the supernatural to bring harm to someone. But that’s certainly not what people are talking about when they talk about Macbeth being cursed. It’s not as if you wish Macbeth upon someone and then they fall into a well or get struck by lightning. The theater tradition of Macbeth‘s curse is something different — something one stumbles into — like a cursed tomb or an unlucky streak.

I had a colleague once who told me that he was studying the notion of “profane spaces”, or the opposite of “sacred spaces”. The curse of the Scottish play is more like this notion of a “profane space” than a retributive curse. Except that a play isn’t a exactly a space so much as an activity, and we don’t give a whole lot of regular thought to profane activities. (Illegal, unethical and immoral activities, sure, but I take it that the profane is somewhat different than the immoral. Also, the idea of an “immoral space” doesn’t sound like it makes much sense.) So a profane activity would be one which, while not being immoral, nevertheless invites great misfortune or even disaster when you get caught up in it. The possibility of misfortune or disaster wouldn’t be enough to make an activity profane, though. Swimming during a lightning storm is stupid, but not profane. Riding in a car is dangerous, but not profane either. Lately it seems like there’s a lot of evidence that running for Congress might indeed be a profane activity.

But why Macbeth?

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I’m recovering from the aforementioned vacation (that really didn’t turn out to be much of a vacation) by slowly reading Richard Galvin’s article on “Varieties of Kantian Constructivism in Ethics” in January’s Phil Quarterly and thinking about connections to what it means to have a meaningful life. At one point he lays out Kant and Korsgaard’s familiar point that what it means to have an autonomous will is to be able to “freely set and pursue [one's] own ends”. Basically this post is thinking out loud (or rather, in type) about what it means for a person to set ends.

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I know not everyone is looking forward to the humble “light wheat bread” that’s assigned this week, but my circumstances are a little different this time around. I got involved in the challenge in the first place because all of my previous attempts at learning had failed and I wanted to really learn how to make bread, particularly wheat bread. I didn’t want to be at the mercy of supermarket bread for the rest of my life. I wanted the house to smell good at least once a week. I really didn’t care about fruits or nuts or English muffins because my goal was to learn good plain bread. Over the last few weeks, I’ve learned a lot about kneading and gluten development. So I was eager to apply this knowledge to a loaf of utilitarian wheat bread. And here’s the best part: after spending a weekend away, I was all out of bread. For the first time, I didn’t go to the market. I decided just to bake bread myself. In the course of this, I made the first sandwich loaf I’m really proud of. I’m going to go ahead and say it: I think I can bake bread now!

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It’s probably a good thing that Osama Bin Laden is dead. By all accounts he seemed like a man in whom there was little left but darkness. Who could be less likable than a depraved and vicious wealthy murderer who wraps himself in the cloak of holiness? The world is a little worse for his existence. But he wasn’t a tyrant. He had relatively little power. So when I heard the news that he was killed last night, I couldn’t help be worried about us.

It wasn’t a worry that we’d be attacked again, though there was plenty of worrying on the airwaves about that. (And seriously, cut it out people. Only through the surreal lens of a spin-hungry American media does the question “Could capturing Osama be bad for Obama?” even sound remotely plausible. Ditto for the “This is great political news for Obama” folks.) I was worried about the fist-pumping giddiness at the man’s death that you could almost hear spreading throughout the internet at a hundred Facebook posts a second. It’s probably a good thing that Osama Bin Laden is dead. But not all good things deserve celebration. Some have to be endured.

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