John, great post.

The specific “abortion=murder” examples you gave, I think, demonstrate a problem with a lot of people’s models: they don’t define their terms carefully enough. Abortion IS always the taking of an innocent human life (which we generally call “murder”), but abortion is sometimes the correct choice to make. Both of the models you gave have some validity — one uses the term “murder” correctly, while the other recognizes that abortion is not always the wrong choice to make (how often “not always” is determines the parameter value.)

I model morality as a value-based (rather than harm-based) system, wherein we try to protect and enhance those things we value. “Innocent human life” is way up there on the list, so in most cases we try to protect it, but there are a few things we value more in some circumstances. When both a mother and the child in her womb are innocent, and by some fluke of biology only one will live, I value the mother more than the child so I see an abortion as tragic but necessary — it’s totally against one thing I value, but the only way I can preserve the other. When the lives of innocent children in Lebanon are weight against continued rocket attacks against Israel and the continued existance of Hezbollah, I view military strikes as tragic but necessary for the same reason. But if we had the technology to make more precise strikes, or to save both the mother and child, those should be done because they’d better preserve / protect the things I value. (This is a practical application of some of the concepts from the courses I’ve taken on optimizing multi-variable functions with time-dependent constraints. Yeah, I’m a math nerd too.)

I think the biggest difference between most people in the West is that we organize our values in slightly different orders. Or, to use the terminology above, we’ve assigned different parameter values in the function we’re optimizing. I think if average people realized that, we’d have fewer accusations of “your side is teh EVIL” and more people willing to work with one another to accomplish things. But, a lot of people have crappy one-variable models with a binary parameter (“abortion=bad”, “war=bad”, “kittens=good”).

It seems relevant to the issue of serious stresses which China faces.

As Jim Bennett put it, in a talk at the Hudson Institute:

People are mesmerized by the growth curves in China right now. They see pictures of the big skyscrapers in Pudong and, you know, they’re extremely impressed by this, but they’re not looking the fact that China is on the wrong side of a huge transition problem.

If you look at these transition problems in small countries like Taiwan and South Korea, which have very similar social structures, this was a big crisis. It was a huge crisis in Japan, which is not so similar, but had some similar issues, and it led to a, you know, major world war.

China’s got big problems. I hope they work through them peacefully, without an enormous amount of disruptions; but, you know, I’m not going to lay odds on that it’s anything like 80 percent chance of success there. I think they’ve got a 50-50 chance of getting through their democratic transition without major problems and disruption, which are going to be I think the big international crisis of the 2030 or 2040.

Or sooner.

One of the ways to judge a system is by its product. If you construct a manufacturing plant which is totally up to date in every respect, but the appliance that comes out the door is faulty, then there is a systemic disfunction which must be located and corrected.

It is the same with a political system, or a cultural system. If the end product of leadership selection is a grotesque parody of a rational, compassionate, thoughtful human being, and the laws and rulings produced are sinister caricatures of morally sound legislation, then it is not the particular nature of the people involved which creates the problem, but the very essence of the system itself.

If you elect the general run of politician in a republican form of limited and power balanced government such as ours, the limits of the structure prevent many of the excesses found in a system of arbitrary power and unlimited state authority.

Stalin prospered in the system of proletarian dictatorship because that system’s pattern of rewards and punishments fit his personality and moral character.

The reason that the system collapsed under Gorbachev was that his timid attempts at reform, as minimal as they were, were antithetical to the very nature of a totalitarian state. The internal resonances that resulted brought down the house as the support beams cracked and buckled.

If Gorby could have brought himself to be more Stalin, as Brezhnev seemingly could during his reign, the SU might have waxed as it did in the 70′s instead of waning as it actually did.

The byzantine complexity of any major cultural system molds and rewards some personalities, and breaks and rejects others. Ghandi admitted that the tactics he used against the British would be very dangerous if employed against Nazis. MLK would have been arrested and disappeared into the gulag instead of leading rallies of hundreds of thousands in the capitol if he had tried his civil rights campaign in the SU, or China, or Cuba, so much in the news today.

Lord Acton was right, with a vengeance.

Totalitarian systems select those who match their internal ethics, and produce the only product they possibly can produce.

It’s not the luck of the draw. It’s a sure thing.

I find it interesting how people educated in measurement driven fields like science, engineering and business think in numbers whereas people educated in the liberal arts do not. For those in the humanities, words seem vitally alive somehow. Words express concrete reality and form the basis of all thought. The humanist seem to believe that, like the sorcerers of old, they can control anything in the world if they can just speak the right words in the right order.

For the measurement driven, words are merely labels on boxes containing the jumble of information that comprises different concepts. Change the contents of the box and the function of the word changes. Fill a new box and slap a label on it and, bingo, new word.

I think this divide is what makes postmodernism so funny to those in the measurement driven world. For the postmodernist, the boxes and their labels define and control the world. They create reality. For the measurement driven, the boxes and their labels are just temporary and disposable conveniences. Freighting them with great import is like worshiping one’s sock drawer.