Category: Daily Maverick

An archive of columns published while I was writing for Daily Maverick.

Blood deferrals – too important to take personally

Originally published in the Daily Maverick

14983260-blood-donation-medical-buttonOne of the things that allowed this species to survive into the 21st century is our ability to detect patterns, and to make predictions based on those patterns. If you were a hunter, you’d have needed to be able to predict the movement of the beasts you hunt with some degree of accuracy. If you were a farmer, some rough understanding of seasons would have been rather useful, lest you waste all your seed, your water, and all your effort.

We’re here and it’s 2013, which means that our forebears got these sorts of things right with reasonable regularity. Sufficient numbers of them managed to feed themselves, and avoided walking off the edges of cliffs or getting eaten by carnivores. But all of that pattern-recognition and the accompanying storytelling can be a liability, in that it gets in the way of our realising that we are simply one data point, usually interesting only to ourselves and our immediate circle.

And, it gets in the way of seeing other potential stories. Not just the stories of others (helping us to escape our subjectivities), but also the story the data tells by itself, without our fears, hopes, and histories being allowed to corrupt it.

You know your own examples, but the sorts of corruption I mean would include our thinking that problem gambling is significantly prevalent in South Africa just because Aunt Sally has a problem. It’s not, at least not by international standards. Or, when your cold goes away a couple of days after taking some homeopathic remedy, when your confirmation bias allows you to ignore the fact that a cold typically only lasts for a couple of days in any case.

The storytelling I speak of is not just in ascribing patterns to potentially unconnected events, but also in finding intentionality or causality where none might exist. Intentionality, such as that we imagine when describing a tragedy as part of “God’s plan”, because doing so helps to shield us from the fact that we are meaningless. Causality, of the sort we might think we’ve found when some sort of “lucky” token or behaviour correlates with a random moment of good fortune.

The cognitive rules of thumb (or heuristics) that we use in developing these responses served a purpose in allowing us to get this far, and still serve a purpose today. But we no longer need to be as reliant on them, and are increasingly irrational when we do so, because the volume of data available to us is mostly far better suited to analysis by machines than by humans.

The South African National Blood Service illustrates the problem well, introducing all sorts of moral complications at the same time. As reported in the Cape Argus, a gay couple recently had their blood donation deferred (or rejected), thanks to the SANBS policy of deferring donations from men who have had sex with other men in the last six months.

One narrative that fits this policy is that the SANBS is homophobic, and this narrative has enjoyed strong support on social media for the last few days. But as I wrote in a 2011 column, deferring blood from this category of donor isn’t atypical, and South Africa’s blood service is in fact fairly liberal in this regard. In the UK, the deferral period is one year, while in the US a lifetime restriction applies for men who have had any sexual encounter with another man at any time since 1977.

Now, there’s no principled reason why we should think the US or UK a good guide to policy in this or any other instance. But there’s also no reason to be guided by the perception of discrimination based on moral judgement, where the discrimination might instead be based on cold, impersonal data.

As I note above, this is exactly the problem: we struggle to think of ourselves as mere data points, and instead wish for the world to bend to shape our anecdotal experiences (or anecdata). I have little reason to doubt the statistics reported – across various international jurisdictions – on the Centers for Disease Control website, or the FDA’s reasoning for why they defer blood donations from men who have sex with other men.

The statistics show that this group are “at increased risk for HIV, hepatitis B and certain other infections that can be transmitted by transfusion”. This claim is either true or false, and whether it is true or false is not a matter of morality or preference – just like it’s either true or false that tattoos and body piercings lead to increased risk of hepatitis C (the current motivation for a 6-month deferral period in Canada).

So, we can either contest the claim on empirical grounds, and refute the claim of increased risk from blood donations from men who have sex with other men, or we can claim inconsistency, saying that if this is true, that there is also increased risk from heterosexual couples who have anal sex.

In a recent interview on CapeTalk567, a representative of the SANBS seemed to concede the possibility of this sort of inconsistency, saying that they would be considering this in the upcoming revisions to their donation forms.

But even if this inconsistency is borne out by the data – in other words, if other categories of donor exist whose blood donations are, in general, at least as (or more) dangerous than this category is – this wouldn’t mean that more gay men should donate blood. It would mean that they still shouldn’t, and that neither should some other people. So the complaints to the SANBS regarding discrimination are never likely to bear the fruit that some potential gay donors are hoping it does, unless it’s empirically false that this category of donated blood is more risky.

My use of the word “shouldn’t” (as opposed to couldn’t) in the previous paragraph alludes to an important point. As much as we’d all like to give blood, another aspect of treating ourselves as a data point – at least when thinking about public policy – is that we’ve got very strong reasons for wanting to be able to trust that we could receive donated blood safely. So the issue of which deferrals are legitimate, and which are not, is important enough to merit resolution by careful reflection and analysis, rather than to simply be the subject of this week’s bout of righteous indignation.

I get (real) mail

It’s been very many years since I’ve received a handwritten letter in the mail (not counting letters from the UCT Registrar, who sometimes prefers to record official business on paper, with pen. I’m afraid I have little idea as to his heuristic for deciding when email is sufficient and when pen and paper are necessary, and in realising this, resolve to ask him that question soonest.) It’s probably been at least 10 years since any other correspondence has arrived in this format, though, so I was quite surprised to find this in my postbox at work today.

Seeing as the Daily Maverick has a real names comment policy, and this was intended as a comment to my column last week, I’ll presume that it’s okay to post it here, before briefly responding. I’ve shrunk the images, so in case you can’t read them, the covering letter includes the question:

If you could single out what distresses you most about life in South Africa, what would it be? For me, it is the Aztec-like acceptance of violent death in civil society.

This gave me little indication of what was to come, considering that the question is sensible even if (to my mind) put somewhat hyperbolically. The letter itself reads:

Failed attempt to submit to the Daily Maverick, in reply to Jacques Rousseau’s article on culture.

Our ‘sentient and compassionate’, ‘affirming and inspirational’ culture condones ‘oppressive and restrictive’ attitudes towards those it deems ‘inferior and unworthy’ for questioning its orthodox principles.

A paid-up member of this ‘groupthink’ culture is required to:

  • Replace puritanical attitudes to sex with puritanical attitudes to thought.
  • Endorse strident feminism.
  • Support pugnacious homosexuality (see Pierre de Vos’s bitchy reply to the unfortunate Mulholland).
  • Be sceptically deconstructive (see Richard Poplak’s diagnosis of J.M. Coetzee as a substitute for examining his sensible speech at the Wits graduation ceremony).
  • Excoriate the government but sanctify The People, and increasingly untenable position.
  • Curse colonialism, Christianity, apartheid and big business (modish apocalyptic horsemen, past).
  • Lament racism, poverty, inequality, and unemployment (modish apocalyptic horsemen, present).
  • Embrace multiculturalism while proselytising his own.
  • Hound the carriers of our plagues, usually conservative, white, heterosexual men or black men who understand the efficacy of patronage within their own culture.

A tall order, but then virtue was never easy.

To be honest, I have no idea what to make of this. I was hoping that typing it out would make it more clear, but I still have little idea whether Ms Vorster thinks I am either a member of this ‘groupthink’ culture, or a campaigner against it, or neither.

It seems that her first paragraph introduces a dissatisfaction with political correctness and groupthink, and that her letter is concerned with some negative effects this culture could have in allowing for unfair judgements against ‘outsiders’. The quoted bits describing culture are plucked from various paragraphs of my original column, though, where some were descriptive, some aspirational, and some facetious. She seems to have read me as describing an actual and extant culture, which I certainly wasn’t. The major point of my column was that we normally can’t be prescriptive about culture, and that it’s as meaningless or meaningful as you’d like it to be. We can be prescriptive about behaviour, though, and if your culture involves harming unwilling participants, I’ve got no problem with saying that aspect x of culture y is reprehensible, and must change.

If it wasn’t for her covering letter, where she refers to reading my columns “with pleasure”, I’d have no problem interpreting this letter as a rant against lefties, and an appeal for less wishy-washy tolerance of various cultural norms. Because this seems to imply that she thinks me an ally. Fair enough, I might say as a general response to many lefties, in that I hate the soft relativism of not making judgements as much as some of you might do. But then, this doesn’t need to be accompanied by an endorsement of bigotry, as Ms Vorster seems to be demanding when referring to my colleague Pierre de Vos’s “pugnacious homosexuality” and his “bitchy reply to the unfortunate Mulholland”.

Mulholland deserved all he got from de Vos, and more (though I preferred Rebecca Davis’s response myself). To pick up on a few of the other points Ms Vorster makes, I’ve got complicated responses to feminism, in that we’d first need to agree on what the term means. If “strident feminism” entails pointing out the pervasive privilege afforded to men in society, and campaigning to eliminate it, then I’m a strident feminist myself – even though the need for feminism as a special cause can be interrogated, seeing as this particular inequality could be captured in a general assault on discrimination. But if strident feminism means thinking that “The Rule of Men” informs any potential experience, then we speak very different languages (and, live on different planets).

If Poplak’s critique was flawed, Coetzee would – from the little I know of him – be concerned with the flaws, but nevertheless applaud the attempt at a challenging and interesting reading. As for excoriation, I’m happy to excoriate both or either of the government or the people, depending on which of them do or say the most stupid things while I’m trying to come up with a column idea. Of all the horsemen listed, I don’t like any besides big business, which can be good or bad depending on what it does and how it spends its profits (if any). If groupthink means it’s bad to not like apartheid, poverty and so forth, I really hope that Ms Vorster thinks I’m a victim of it.

I don’t embrace multiculturalism. I embrace the idea that people should leave each other the hell alone, regardless of culture, that arguments should be judged on their merits (with cultural longevity or popularity certainly not counting as a merit), and that if we end up agreeing (“groupthink”) it should ideally be because we’ve all considered the issue, and come to the same reasoned conclusion. Maligning our general agreement on something like anti-sexism as “groupthink” obscures the fact that reasonable people tend to agree on what’s reasonable, for good reasons.

As for the “carriers of our plagues, usually conservative, white, heterosexual men or black men who understand the efficacy of patronage within their own culture” – it’s little surprise that these categories are responsible for most of our social ills. For much of white South Africa, those conservative, white, heterosexual men wrote the rules, and the rules are bad ones (because they are aimed at inequality and perpetuating privilege). For much of South Africa, the same is true for powerful black men, who dominate through similar networks of patronage. Are we supposed to be blaming the poor for our misery, or the otherwise disenfranchised?

Back to the covering letter:

If you could single out what distresses you most about life in South Africa, what would it be? For me, it is the Aztec-like acceptance of violent death in civil society.

That too many people seem to think that complaining, signing a petition, or Tweeting furiously is going to make any difference to anything. If you have a skill, you could donate some of it to a civil society movement. If you can teach, do so. If you have time, give some of that. If you have money, find a worthwhile charity. That’s the high-minded answer. The more banal answer is that it’s distressing to have the same debates, each and every year/month/day, where (sometimes) it seems that nobody is doing any listening at all.

Covering note Page1 Page2

President Zuma: dogging South Africans with stereotypes about culture

Originally published in the Daily Maverick

sad-dogCulture is restrictive and oppressive, and it is used to generate further oppression. Not simply because you’re told what to believe in the name of culture, but because what you are told to believe can be oppressive or restrictive. Perhaps, that you’re not the equal of a man. Perhaps, that as a man, you are necessarily responsible for the oppression of women.

Culture is also a reference point for where we’ve come from, and how we ended up here. It’s what binds us in times of strife, or when others tell us that we’re somehow inferior or unworthy of survival or happiness. Culture is what gives us beautiful art – music, paintings, books – and it is what renews our creativity through the wellspring of ideas it provides.

Culture is a handy card to play when trying to rally political support, especially if you can appeal to a version of culture that speaks of a struggle against oppression, and therefore a historical debt that is owed to that struggle. Without the comfort and strength provided by culture, we would never have survived. Or so the narrative might go, if you thought that culture comes with chains.

Culture can be all these things. But most importantly, it can be what you want it to be, including nothing of any significance at all. And you can mix and match not only elements of culture, but also the respect with which you regard various elements of various cultures. But when the idea of culture is used as a straightjacket, as a way to enforce loyalty or groupthink, it is only and always restrictive and oppressive.

When a President says that black South Africans should stop adopting the customs of other cultures, such as appearing to care more for their animals than they do for their fellow South Africans, he ends up transgressing various aspects of logic as well as of decency. Decency, because one unspoken implication of that speech last December was that white dog-owning folk had no humanity, and that black folk who loved their dog were somehow less black.

Logic, simply because of the obvious contradictions immediately pointed out on Twitter and elsewhere, via photographs of Mandela, Vavi and others being friendly with various furry animals. Zuma’s speech clearly contained some foot-in-mouth, though, and it’s uncharitable to read reports of a speech like this literally. He was (at least, as far as I can tell) referring to the fact that it sometimes seems that people care more for (relative) frivolities than for their fellow human beings.

If this is accurate, it’s of course still deeply problematic to square the humanitarian Zuma with the one who appears in our headlines most days for some allegation of corruption, or the construction of multi-million Rand homesteads. Let’s leave that aside, as I have no trouble believing that he at least believes he cares, and was speaking sincerely.

What I want to highlight here is culture. Because what Zuma is saying in a speech like this is an insult to culture, or to the sort of culture I describe above as an affirming and sometimes inspirational one. Because Zuma could be accused of telling black South Africans to take direction from his repressive stereotypes, rather than the repressive stereotypes that the white man brought to Africa. He’s saying that black South Africans are free, but only up until the point where they butt up against the boundaries of culture that he is prescribing.

The point of freedom is to be free to choose. Zuma is correct that some people seem to care more for their pets than for humans, and I’d agree with him that it’s wrong to do so. Not because of culture, or at least not because of “black” culture or “white” culture – rather something like a “sentient” or “compassionate” culture. And perhaps, a culture that eschews opportunism, preferring to work towards the long-term benefit of all South Africans.

This means, at least in part, eliminating the race-baiting that has become such a reliable part of his rhetoric. I understand that many of us white South Africans appear (and often are) insensitive to culture and its manifestation, especially now that “our” culture blankets most of the world we get to hear about. But this doesn’t justify adding to the caricatures of what white and black people do and believe – and it certainly doesn’t justify telling people what they should believe.

Culture changes, and anyone who won’t allow it to is an oppressor. If you choose to hold on to some cultural elements and customs that are significant and not harmful to others, I shouldn’t judge you for that. When you use culture as a weapon to abuse common sense, and to guilt people into loyalty, I will judge you for that, as should we all.

And some of us will judge you even more harshly when you make it clear that you’re just making things up as you go along. Or is Mac Maharaj actually just trying to embarrass you, by protesting that you were simply trying to “decolonise the African mind” while you made noises about a national cleansing ceremony, to be hosted by none other than Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu – a representative of a faith that exists here largely thanks to colonialism?

Assuming that the vote of no confidence fails, Mr President – and assuming that you actually give more of a damn about your country than you’ve ever appeared to – why not spend 2013 and onwards focusing on speeches (and decisions, naturally) that help us to find common purpose, instead of on ones that deepen or even create divisions?

You have your second term, after all, and the threats you personally face during that term will come from people and institutions like the Public Prosecutor and Parliament. The threats to your party, on the other hand, seem to come mainly from people like you. To put it simply – if you don’t stop being such an embarrassment, South African voters may soon begin to consider having a cleansing ceremony of their own.

A free market in false choices

Originally published in the Daily Maverick

Leon Louw, Exec Director of the Free Market FoundationEarlier this month, Business Day published a quite peculiar column by Leon Louw, executive director of the Free Market Foundation. It’s peculiar in a number of ways, ranging from its poorly motivated hostility towards “most journalists”, academics and the Right2Know Campaign; its engagement with a straw-man version of arguments against the Protection of State Information Bill (PoSIB); some failures of logic; and finally, the apparent assumption that because he’s a libertarian, the rest of us must also be.

The column starts with a non sequitur: because “most journalists salivate with glee at every state intervention”, they should be delighted that the National Council of Provinces (NCOP) have passed the Bill. Instead, they are “squealing like stuck pigs”. But it doesn’t require the sort of special pleading Louw alleges for journalists to be particularly concerned about PoSIB by comparison to other threats to freedom (if they even are – Louw provides no evidence for the journalistic bias he alleges). Their jobs hinge on being able to disseminate information, and it thus stands to reason that state intervention in that domain is objectively more important to them than state intervention in other domains.

Louw thinks it a problem that some journalists, academics and the folk at R2K repeat the mantra that “people have the right to know” as if it settles the matter. That is true – any mantra that isn’t backed up by some argument is a problem, which is why it’s useful that the R2K campaign have provided this guide as to how the Bill still fails their “freedom test”.

Personally, I find some of the R2K arguments overly scaremongering, and have on occasion taken issue with their strategic choices (the timing and implementation of vigils, sit-ins and the like). But their role is precisely to be the flag-bearer of freedom as it pertains to PoSIB, and it makes little sense to criticise them for not being concerned with other freedoms.

Louw also accuses “the media” of being inconsistent, saying: “But people also have the right to food, clothes, healthcare, insurance, liquor, banking, jobs, cigarettes, energy and much more. By logical extension, the media should demand unregulated retailing, medical schemes, insurance, alcohol, banking, labour, tobacco and electricity with comparable conviction. But they don’t.”

I don’t need to find my copy of the Constitution to establish that Louw is (hopefully) engaging in hyperbole with regard to some of those rights, such as to cigarettes or liquor. I’d imagine that Louw and I might even be in agreement that positive rights are in general best avoided – and we have enough difficulty providing the more sensible ones (education) to start to try to provide cigarettes for all.

So let’s assume he’s talking about our “rights” to smoke where we like, when we like. I’ve written before about how our current legislation consists of a gross violation of liberty, but that doesn’t mean that all restrictions on where smokers can smoke are equally unreasonable. “Logical extension” does not require that “the media” should demand unregulated freedoms in other areas, for two simple reasons: those other areas might not be analogous; and Louw’s “logical extension” is a blatant straw- man.

“They” (the media) don’t demand unregulated freedom of information, but rather, more sensibly regulated freedom of information. What they (whomever they might be) consider sensible or not can of course be debated, but I’ve seen few in the media, few academics, and nobody in R2K demanding that we all get to be Julian Assange.

Louw seems to regard PoSIB as far less threatening than many others do, describing it as “comparatively benign”. This is of course a matter of interpretation and of our varying appetites for trusting the judgement of state bureaucrats. I agree with Louw that it’s not as threatening as some seem to think – especially in my main area of concern, academic freedom.

And Louw is certainly correct in pointing out that similar sorts of legislation exist most elsewhere in the world, where they typically haven’t led to some form of police state. But just because the R2K campaign and others argue that the Bill gets various things wrong does not mean that they have to subscribe to the same general philosophy with regard to freedom that Louw does. In other words, they are not being inconsistent when arguing against PoSIB while remaining silent on other intrusions on freedom.

This is most obviously the case for the reason I state above – they were formed in opposition to PoSIB. As for the media, information is a necessary good, so it makes perfect sense that they be more concerned about restrictions on that than any other restrictions. And, for both these groups, excessive rhetoric can be expected (and, can be effective) in trying to rally a largely apathetic public to support their causes.

But there’s also no obligation on the media or R2K to defend the same freedoms that Mr Louw and his organisation do. They are not being inconsistent through not taking a libertarian stance on freedom in general. Sure, they might be wrong to not do so, but that’s a separate matter. Louw needs to judge them on their own ideological stances, and not on his (while trying to change their ideologies, if he so chooses).

“Unlike people who espouse self-serving freedoms, lovers of liberty espouse freedom for all”, says Louw, followed by the hopeful observation that the debate might serve as a “wake-up call for those journalists who have never internalised the immortal observation that freedom is indivisible”.

Freedom is indeed indivisible. But that doesn’t mean we can’t disagree on how to define freedom, or on how to campaign towards those definitions of freedom that we find most coherent and pragmatically feasible to attain. In the unlikely event that we ever do reach agreement on those matters, it will still be possible for different people and different groups to campaign for various aspects of that freedom. Louw, by contrast, seems to be arguing that those who want to save the rhinos must simultaneously want to nuke the rest of the environment and its residents.

But if Louw is indeed correct in his definitions of what freedom is and how best we can protect it, it is his job to make that case. But he shouldn’t be surprised to find that those who are “squealing like stuck pigs” over PoSIB might not be all that receptive to hearing someone, ostensibly campaigning for freedom, telling them that this means becoming a “praise singer for government intervention against everyone else”.

In this season of gifting, I can’t help but think that for the Free Market Foundation, free markets seem to mean that each shelf should be stocked with the same false choice as the next one.

Welcome, robot overlords

Originally published in the Daily Maverick

On a flight back from somewhere, earlier this year, the pilot announced to us that we’d just been treated to a fully automated landing. While nobody expressed any concern, there were a few thoughtful or confused looks around the cabin, of people not quite sure how to respond to this news.

My first thought was regarding the timing of the announcement. Just in case anyone would be concerned at being landed by an algorithm, the SAA (I think it was) management (yes, I know) presumably decided to only let us know once the deed had successfully been done. But I also wondered how many others were, like me, thinking something along the lines of “it’s about time”.

It’s about time, I mean, that we acknowledge that humans are inferior to computers at making some decisions, and that we should therefore remove humans from the equation. And not just some – in areas where decisions are made by reference to a multitude of factors, and the intended outcome (such as landing a plane safely) is unambiguous, I’d be tempted to up that to “most”.

Pilots are of course well trained, and no doubt need to pass regular checks for things that might impair judgement, like drugs, alcohol or sleep-deprivation. That’s one of the reasons that far fewer people die from accidents involving planes than die from accidents involving cars. But another reason is that we think far too highly of ourselves, and our own competence at performing routine tasks in adverse circumstances – like driving home after one too many drinks.

We’re reluctant to understand ourselves as a simple statistical data-point, far more likely to conform to the mean than not. Anecdotes trump data every time for most of us, which is why we can think that we’re superb drivers while under the influence of something, until that day when we’re just a drunk driver, like all the other drunk drivers who have caused accidents since booze first got behind the wheel of a large metal object.

But despite our occasional incompetence in this regard – and note, also an incompetence that we can to some extent control – is it time to hand everyday driving over to computers also? I’d say it might well be, for those of us who can afford to. Because even if you’re as alert as you could possibly be, you’re still not able to simultaneously engage with as many variables as a computer can, and nor are you able to react to the outputs of that engagement as quickly.

Computers – or robots – pose questions beyond whether they or a human would be superior at performing a given task, like getting you to the church on time or destroying an enemy installation during war. In war, proportionality of response is a key issue for determining whether a drone attack is legal or not, and as soon as a drone is fully autonomous, we’d need to be able to trust that its software got those judgements right.

Or would we? The standards that we set for human beings allows for mistakes, so it would be inconsistent to refuse the possibility of error for robots, even if they were unable to express contrition, or to make amends. As with many encroachments of technology into our existence, robotics is an area where we need to be careful of privileging the way that humans have always done things, just because we are human.

Cloned or genetically modified food, in vitro fertilisation, surrogate motherhood, stem-cell research (to list but a few examples) are all areas where either a sort of naturalistic fallacy (thinking something morally superior or inferior depending on whether it’s natural or not) or some sort of emotive revulsion (the “yuk factor”) get in the way of a clear assessment of costs versus benefits. When speaking of robots driving our children home from school, a similarly emotive reaction can also cloud our thinking.

Just as with any data point in an set, you and me and everyone we know more often feels superior in whatever skill set than actually is better at that skill than the mean. The mean describes something: in this case, it describes the level of performance of the average person. And if we were all better than average, the average would be higher. For driving, it’s not, or we wouldn’t have an average of over 700 road fatalities every month.

So the question to ask is: when can we be confident that – on average – fewer people will die on the roads if cars are robotic than if the drivers are human? If we’ve reached the point of being confident about that, then the moral calculus shifts against human drivers. If you have the means and opportunity, you’d be acting less morally to drive your kids to school than have a computer do so – regardless of how this feels.

In the New Yorker, Gary Marcus recently invited us to consider this scenario:

Your car is speeding along a bridge at 50mph when [an] errant school bus carrying 40 innocent children crosses its path. Should your car swerve, possibly risking the life of its owner (you), in order to save the children, or keep going, putting all 40 kids at risk? If the decision must be made in milliseconds, the computer will have to make the call.

As Sarah Wild and others have pointed out in response, this sort of scenario does raise question about which rules we would like the car to follow, who makes those rules, and who is to blame when some unfortunate accident or death occurs. But where I think most comment on this issue gets it wrong is in labelling the moral dilemmas “tricky”, as Wild does.

If we can, on average, save many more lives by using robotic cars instead of human-controlled ones, the greater good would at some point certainly be maximised. Yes, there will be circumstances where the “wrong” person dies, because a maximise-life-saving algorithm will not be adaptable to very idiosyncratic circumstances, like the one described by Marcus.

In general, though, the robotic car will not speed, will never run a red light, and will never exceed the threshold for maintaining traction around a corner. It will never drive drunk, and will be far better at anticipating the movements of other vehicles (even if they’re not robots, on the same information grid themselves), thanks to a larger data-set than ours and an objective assessment of that data.

So it’s not that there is a tricky moral dilemma here. What’s tricky is that we aren’t able to view it – and ourselves – as a simply economic problem, where the outcome that would be best for all of us would be to set things up in a way that maximises life, on aggregate.

Any solution that prioritises human agency or building in mechanisms to know who to blame when things go wrong is understandable. But, once the driverless car is sophisticated enough, it would also be a solution that operates contrary to a clear moral good.

Setting aside our differences

Originally published at the Daily Maverick

Daily Maverick readers will no doubt have noticed that last week, many of this community of opinionistas, editors and journalists congregated for The Gathering 2.0. A fair number of you were there too, and those I spoke with – readers and contributors alike – confirmed that they got as much value out of it as I did.

One key factor in its success, at least as far as I’m concerned, had to do with the value of community, shared goals and aspirations. Finding common ground and room for collaboration has always been difficult, and it has perhaps become increasingly difficult in a world of sharply divided identities and rather loud disagreements.

As was the case at the first Gathering two years ago, I was struck by the sense of a common purpose and shared commitment to finding solutions for South Africa and its developmental and political troubles. Sure, we sometimes disagreed on what those solutions should be, but there was little doubting our sincerity in looking for them.

It’s rare, though, to get to have these conversations in rooms without hostile commenters, and where a combination of ticket prices, self-selection and invitations extended pretty much ensured that people were going to be respectful, even when they disagreed. Out there on the Internet, or in more typical gatherings, civility and respect are not so easily guaranteed.

One thing that has certainly changed for me in the time between these two gatherings is my desire to attempt to be more sympathetic to the reasons why people disagree on goals and strategy – especially in the area of religion, where most of my attempted interventions take place.

Those of you who follow the endless squabbles in the secular, sceptical, or atheist community will know that fighting with each other is as much a part of the game as combating religious dogma is. And this isn’t only because there can be dogmatism and unreason on the non-religious side too – which there certainly can be – but also because everyone is sometimes guilty of being more interested in being right than in making progress.

Making progress – whether it be finding a political solution to a seemingly intractable problem, or persuading the rank-and-file Catholic to join you in publicly denouncing a child-abuse-enabling Cardinal – sometimes requires collaboration rather than antagonism. And, the former is more often appropriate than the latter is, as far as I’m concerned.

Don’t get me wrong – there is room for anger, and there is room for the sharpest criticism. Not only because the sharp criticism can inspire others to break with a tradition or belief, or serve as a lightning rod for debate, but also because it’s sometimes deserved.

The column I abandoned writing this week was going to amount to an extended insult (on issues, rather than ad hominem) directed at Blade Nzimande, and (leaving aside the fact that he would probably never have noticed it) attacking him seems permissible because he is presumably capable of brushing it off.

Likewise, I can feel more comfortable attacking Ray MacCauley rather than his parishioners, or the quack Professor or Doctor rather than those that change their diets or medical regimes on his or her advice. Because we all make mistakes, and while we should all sometimes know better, those of us in authority or with the expertise required to make the judgement in question should know best of all.

But as with any area of contestation – and especially in what I’m confident is an Internet-fuelled tribalism and hyperbole – caricatures so often win out over trying to find common ground. On the pro-science and secular side (and note the false dichotomy there – as if the religious can’t be pro-science, just like pro-life invites the caricature of “anti-life”), what community there is is partly premised on a caricature of the “other”, just like religious folk can easily point to some obnoxious atheist they know and use that person as their baseline for understanding non-believers.

What I worry about in these cartoonish versions of reality is firstly the possibility that we’re forsaking opportunities to learn things – about each other, about difference, about persuasion; and second that we’re impeding progress towards what could in many instances be common goals.

A significant proportion of secular activism – at least on the web – currently consists of people mindlessly (or so it appears) sharing photographs of a Hitchens or Sagan looking thoughtful, and accompanied by an inspirational (or blasphemous) quote. Often, these imagines will come from Facebook groups such as “I fu**ing love science” – as if saying so makes it true.

It doesn’t make it true. Mostly, we love the false impression of community that’s gained through imagining that the other – whether it be the unscientific, Bronze Age-mythology believing monotheist, or the dogmatic, immoral and cruel New Atheist – through the eyes of our respective prejudices.

I’m currently (too slowly) working on a review of Chris Stedman’s provocative new book “Faitheist” (edit: review now posted here), in which he makes the case for atheists “reaching across the aisle” and getting involved in interfaith efforts aimed at bettering lives. As he puts it somewhere in the book: “Do we simply want to eradicate religion, or do we want to change the world?”

These goals are of course not mutually exclusive, but in our eagerness to caricature each other, I worry that we lose sight of the possibility that focusing on the latter could contribute to achieving the former. More to the point, it could do so at a lower cost than encouraging divisiveness does, because the partisan outlook obscures the fact that we probably have more in common than what divides us.

Of course we need to keep asking whether beliefs are true or not, while encouraging people to discard untrue beliefs where possible, even if they are comforting. But no matter how often we ask those questions, they will have no effect unless someone is listening. And why should anyone listen, when it’s clear that the person asking you to listen has no interest in conversation?

I benefit(ed) from apartheid

Originally published in the Daily Maverick

I certainly benefited from apartheid. And I’ve bought the t-shirt that says so – two of them, in fact – even though I might never wear them except in the company of other 40-something white liberals, with whom I share enough history that misinterpretation is unlikely.

Misinterpretation is unlikely, even as we agree on how many different things the t-shirt could be saying, and often also agree on what it should and should not be saying. It does not need to say that because I’m white, I should feel guilt. It should certainly not be saying that white people should withdraw from political comment, as Samantha Vice once argued.

But outside of the shared space of those of us who – to a lesser or greater degree – participated in some form of protest or activism in the 80s or earlier, this shirt’s message is perhaps a little too ambiguous, and too open to misinterpretation. Two reactions illustrate the problem, and even though these reactions are both far too simplistic, they nevertheless serve as useful examples of two possible extremes.

First, there’s the contribution that “Frank” made to MyNews24, headlined “I benefited from apartheid and other fairy tales”. Frank’s column discussed the “new liberal buzz concept that we as whites … have hugely benefited from a system that has been dead and buried for 18 odd years”. There’s no value in linking to this, as it starts out wrong-headed and quickly ramps up to triumphalist – but completely unreflective – smugness.

While the fact that he thinks this concept “new” might reveal that he’s only started thinking about this recently, more worrying is the fact that he’s bought into a premise that I can’t help but associate with someone who’s unwilling to engage with South Africa’s past (and therefore, present and future) in an honest way. As I’ve argued before, the first democratic elections didn’t somehow flip a magical switch, whereby after 1994 we could be sure that everyone succeeds or fails entirely on merit.

Now, I might like to wear the t-shirt in Frank’s company too, so that he can know he’s alone in wanting to bury his head in the sand, or to engage in acts of “whataboutery” wherein you boycott SAA, or self-righteously stalk the aisles of Pick ‘n Pay rather than Woolworths for a week or two, to say “what about this new-fangled form of racism, eh? Is this what ‘we’ struggled to achieve?”

But then, maybe Frank will think I’m wearing the t-shirt ironically, and never think about the message it’s intended to convey. Or maybe he’ll think, “well, perhaps you did, but my life was hard, and now my kids can’t get into UCT Medical School. And you call this justice?” In other words, maybe Frank will make the mistake we all (white, black, female, male, poor, rich) sometimes do, of thinking that anecdotes count as data.

And then, there’s the other sort of extreme reaction, this time a comment left at the Mail&Guardian (excerpted):

sickening…how self rightous some white south africans can be…so you think a sorry is good enough..a woolies t-shirt with those words is good enough. for me it simply shows the depth at which white people think black people are stupid. How lowly they regard black people’s pain. Will this t-shirt wipe away the memories of apatheid, will it give me the land they took away from my family. will it educate me, will it take away the shame and inferiority complex I have that was passes down to me due to the whites manipulating black people’s minds.

The fact that this reaction is a straw man of the worst order is besides the point, as is the fact that the author of this comment seems to believe that white people are in general insensitive, manipulative, and of the view that black people are stupid. To put it plainly, it’s besides the point that the author of the comment appears to have racist attitudes towards whites.

The reason it’s besides the point is that whether (many or most) whites are like that or not is a separate issue from whether a wearer of this t-shirt in fact benefited from apartheid (which, in general, they certainly would have), what they are trying to say in wearing it and most importantly, whether they think that wearing a t-shirt is all they need to do to wipe the slate clean.

My answers to those questions are not going to be the same as yours. But the key point here is that regardless of what my or your answers might be, those answers aren’t going to necessarily overlap at all with how the t-shirt is perceived by others, and what they think you mean. Intentions aren’t transparent to those who pass us on the street, and the performative role of this t-shirt is a fundamentally ambiguous thing – not to mention potentially a rather offensive thing.

And lastly, there are two quite general problems with this t-shirt, which further decrease the likelihood of my ever wearing one, despite now owning two. First, because as much as it’s true that whites benefited from apartheid, apartheid – or at least its legacy – is increasingly becoming the narrative by which some tenderpreneurs and politicians (even Presidents) enrich themselves at the expense of people who are currently, not previously, disadvantaged.

As much as the t-shirt would speak the truth if I were to wear it, would it be any less true if worn by President Zuma, even though the benefits might be of a very different form? If apartheid didn’t provide Zuma and the ANC with a narrative of being essential to the liberation from apartheid, would he and others not perhaps be in jail?

The other general problem is that what the t-shirt says is partly false. Yes, I did benefit from apartheid, as (on aggregate) all whites did. But I still benefit, because of the cultural capital, the confidence, and from the fact that the vast majority of people in power at my institution are white liberal males, just like me. How could I not have benefited and continue to benefit? After all, isn’t that what apartheid was designed for?

Brands vs. personal identity on Twitter

Originally published in the Daily Maverick

Should people be suspended for having a terrible sense of humour? Or were Lance Witten and McIntosh Polela suspended because of terrible judgement instead? Both their own, in terms of what they found humorous, as well as on the part of their respective employers, who allowed themselves to be forced into action by the moralistic masses on social media.

Terrible judgement seems the more likely option, but it’s perhaps not only Polela and Witten who are guilty of it. They know that they are public figures, and they know that this makes them a target for the sort of finger wagging we seldom direct at our own behaviour. But do we – and their employers – have to enforce groupthink, or can we separate the brand from the individual?

In case you don’t know what these two did to deserve suspension (in the eyes of their employers, at least), Polela made a joke about prison rape on Twitter after Molemo “Jub Jub” Maarohanye was sentenced to prison for murder, and Witten made a joke (also on Twitter) about people “dying to see Linkin Park”.

Given that prison rape is reportedly a significant problem in South African jails, and that Florentina Heaven-Popa died after scaffolding collapsed on her and others at the Cape Town Linkin Park concert last week, these jokes were certainly in very poor taste.

However, having poor taste is something that’s only directly relevant to people who work in fashion, food, or whatever areas involve being an authority on discerning what the most desirable product on offer might be in a given situation. Suspending someone for having poor taste in humour – for saying something that many would find offensive – makes the statement that we must all have the same values, and that dissenting from those values is not permissible.

It also makes the statement that we (as a company) don’t trust our customers to be able to distinguish between our employees as people and the company as a whole. This is where one has to consider the possibility that their respective employers are also guilty of poor judgement, in that they’ve played a part in letting hyperbole win, and in helping to feed an appetite for sensation that we should instead be doing our best to quell.

One reason that social media policies are necessary is that people seem incapable of realising that what you say on Twitter or Facebook can reflect negatively on your employers. Another reason that social media policies are necessary is because employers are willing to bow to the demands of the pitchfork-wielding public, who make threats of boycotts over every perceived slight. And then, forget about it the next week, when some new offence is paraded in front of them through a hyperbolic headline.

Seriously – how often have you heard of someone who was not killed “execution style”? When last was a person or a report “criticised” or “challenged” rather than “slammed”? And why can’t eNCA have the option of saying, “Lance Witten might be a tosspot, sure, and he really shouldn’t have made that joke. So ‘unfriend’ him if you like, but he works for us as a sports anchor, and he’s good enough at that that we see no reason to suspend him”.

They can’t have that option because we don’t allow them that option. Our thirst for sensation, and our inability to separate the various roles that people perform in professional and private lives, makes it impossible for a company to say that perfection is an unreasonable standard to expect from our employees, and that there are other ways of distancing yourself from comments or from employees than by suspending or firing those employees.

All that we are doing is satisfying the desire for some public flogging, after all. The idea that anyone learns any sort of lesson here (besides the lesson of “keep your views to yourself”) is implausible. Because we always forget, and because all that’s necessary to speed up our forgetting is a brief period of suspension, a public apology, and some new distraction – which is usefully always around the corner.

And so it goes, again and again, and the main loser is our sense of perspective. Yes, jokes can be offensive. But Witten, Polela – or you, or me – won’t stop making offensive jokes, or come to agree with each other on which jokes are permissible or not as a result of suspensions like these. We’ll just tell the same jokes, more privately, while our public spaces become more homogenised, and thus (one suspects the thinking goes) “safer”.

Companies must, of necessity, have an interest in their brand and how the market perceives it. This would certainly entail avoiding any real scandals, especially those perpetrated by senior figures in that company. But if reputational harm comes to implicate every tweet of every employee, there’s little chance of preserving reputation.

It’s become a truism to say that the brand and the person can’t be separated – but that isn’t necessarily because it’s true. One possible social media policy doesn’t seem to attract the attention it seems to deserve, and it would go something like this:

Our company values are x. While we try to hire people who share those values, there are also other job requirements that sometimes have an equal or higher priority. So, unless informed otherwise, please assume that individuals are responsible for their own comments on social media, and that none of their comments should be understood as expressing the company’s views.

We don’t believe that we are the best judges of what should be a universal morality. We respect our customers enough to want to avoid the paternalism of assuming that they are incapable of telling difference between individual employees and us. And finally, we respect our customers too much to think that they need our protection from things they might find offensive.  Have a nice day.

Postscript: Via 6000, here’s an example of sanity prevailing in this area. The Christian whose case is discussed in the article is of course a homophobe and a bigot, and that’s not good. But he’s allowed to be those things, especially on his own time.

Do liberals misrepresent Mourdock?

As submitted to Daily Maverick

It’s not easy to be objective. In fact, it’s close to impossible – and it might not even be desirable. But being objective is not the same thing as being fair to the evidence, which is something we should always strive for. No matter what perspective you think the evidence justifies, you’re not going to get anywhere in persuading someone else of that perspective if they discover that you’re wrong about the facts.

Being right about the facts is itself difficult. Not only because the data we have can sometimes be contradictory, but because our datasets are always incomplete. The facts that contradict any given interpretation might not be known, and worse still, might not even be knowable at a given point in time.

What we can do, though, is to try to acknowledge the biases we do know of, and try to not allow those biases to lead to misrepresentation. Unless you care more about persuasion than being fair, that is. And in politics being fair often seems to take a back seat, because the stakes are high and people might pay attention for just long enough for you to plant some impression in their minds, but rarely for long enough that you could actually engage them in debate.

So, you won’t try talking theology or in this case, theodicy, with regard to Richard Mourdock. Far better to simply assert that he thinks God intends for rape to happen, and for that rape to result in an unwanted pregnancy (which, by his lights, it’s naturally immoral to terminate). That assertion is of course one interpretation of what he said at a recent Indiana Senate debate (see video below), and it’s an interpretation that fits neatly with a stereotype of Mourdock belonging to some disreputable group (whether this means Republicans, men, Christians, or whatever).

But shouldn’t we expect more from ourselves, and from our media? It’s invigorating to have cartoon villains roaming about, to be sure, because it allows for those impassioned speeches at the dinner table, and for us to cast some opposing force as the one who will save us from the approaching menace.

There’s no question that many Republican candidates (most, if you only count the ones we’ve been hearing from) are intent on rolling back the current permissive legal framework around termination of pregnancy. They go further than that in what’s been called the “war on women”, with suggestions for mandating invasive procedures like transvaginal ultrasounds rather than allowing women to choose other ultrasound methods.

As I’ve argued in previous columns (on Obama’s rejection of the FDA recommendations on the morning-after pill, and the Republican ‘Personhood Pledge’), the conservative moral voice does seem to hold a significant influence in American politics, and this influence tends to be exerted to the detriment of reproductive rights. I’ve firmly stated that to my mind the Republican view on this is wrong, and that voters (especially female ones, of course) should oppose these attempts at curtailing their freedom.

But this is because I don’t think a foetus morally significant. If you do – and perhaps especially if you do for reasons such as the sanctity of life – it would be unsurprising for you to think that abortions are immoral. And if you did think they were, this attitude would have to be expressed at the cost of women, because women are the ones who bear the full burden of bringing a child to term. So yes, you could cast this as a “war on women”. Or, you could cast abortion rights as a “war on unborn children” – and both would be hyperbolic, false, and eliminate a whole lot of potentially interesting conversation in favour of being able to hurl epithets at each other.

Just in case this column is triggering anybody’s confirmation bias, I’ll repeat that reproductive freedoms should not be curtailed (in fact, I’d wish for us to be able to discuss extending those freedoms, whether we choose to or not). Regardless of this, it simplifies the conversation to an unfair extent when opponents of abortion, like Mourdock, are cast as claiming that God desired for a woman to be raped.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=626VKRScETI

Listen to the recording for yourselves. Most of you would disagree with him, just as I do. But what he says is that God intends for the life to happen, and he makes it clear that he’s struggled with this issue, and that rape is “terrible”. Sure, this doesn’t go as far as we might want it to. And yes, he wants to take away a women’s right to choose whether to terminate a pregnancy or not, except in situations where her life would be endangered by bringing the child to term (which, we should note, makes him more progressive than some of them).

If what you hear, though, is a Republican candidate saying “God wanted you to be raped”, then the villain you see in front of you is at least partly a projection of your own moral outrage. I believe he he’s wrong, yes – but that he’s wrong for exactly the same reason that millions of Christians around the world are, in believing that one value (the preservation of life) trumps another (the woman’s right to choose). And, in believing that he can pick and choose when to attribute something to God’s plan (the pregnancy yes, the rape no), while simultaneously asserting that God’s ways and plans are ineffable.

So, if you want to pick a fight here, give some thought to whether you’re picking the right one. The same people who complain about Mourdock and the Republican war on women don’t seem to picket traditional Christian churches, where this same message on abortion is conveyed every week. We don’t see op-eds lambasting the one survivor of a bus crash for saying it was God’s plan for everyone else to die.

The outrage regarding Mourdock, in other words, is selective, unprincipled, and born of exactly the same cherry-picking that allows Mourdock to say the sorts of things he does.

Should identity politics dictate beliefs?

As published in Daily Maverick

Arguments with self-described liberals, feminists and various other sorts of people were part of the motivation for my column last week, in which I argued that it’s always illegitimate to dismiss an argument simply because it’s expressed by someone you regard as speaking from privilege. In summary, the person whose view you’re dismissing might be simultaneously privileged as well as correct.

Continue reading “Should identity politics dictate beliefs?”