CoViD-19, School Re-Opening, 55 MPH Speed Limit, and "Acceptable Casualties"

 

Responding to a letter to the editor of my local newspaper in south-central-coastal California (we're a big state)

SUBJECT: "What 'death rate' is acceptable?" Ventura County Star 20 Feb. 2021

Writing about opening schools in the time of the CoViD-19 pandemic, George Maguire of Ventura notes that he has "never heard of what death rate” is acceptable and asks if "someone" can write in and tell teachers and students what death rate is acceptable," adding that "That data is available somewhere" (February 20). 

I’m writing in to compliment Mr. Maguire on raising the old and important question I’ll call "acceptable casualties" and to note that relevant data are available for CoViD-19 and school re-opening but such questions are never just factual. To start, "Acceptable to whom?" and then on to "What values are to be applied?" with one big area, "What is the value of human life?"

Here’s an example from the past that illustrates the point. From Wikipedia (and my memory): "The National Maximum Speed Limit was a provision of the […] 1974 Emergency Highway Energy Conservation Act that effectively prohibited speed limits higher than 55 miles per hour. It was drafted in response to oil price spikes and supply disruptions during the 1973 oil crisis and remained the law until 1995." The data get complicated, but a case could be and was made that "there was a decrease in [traffic] fatalities of about 3,000 to 5,000 lives in 1974, and about 2,000 to 4,000 lives saved annually thereafter through 1983 because of slower and more uniform traffic speeds since the law took effect."

The final repeal of the law in 1995 was very popular. 

Now, let’s say the net savings in human life was a tenth of the estimates, some 300 lives a year: Would 300 additional dead people (and injured and maimed) be "acceptable casualties" for the additional convenience and efficiency of higher speed limits? Would the mere risk of avoidable deaths (injuries, maiming) be acceptable? Ethical decisions either way required making a conscious judgment, and among the Americans ethical enough to think it through — at least with Americans who accepted the conclusion of greater safety — a good number thought the casualties acceptable. 

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Maximum_Speed_Law#Safety_impact>

Or we can look at drug legalization, such as the end of alcohol Prohibition in 1933, and the obvious costs of easier access to alcohol beverages, along with obvious benefits. Of those who think about it at all, most of us think ending capital "P" Prohibition was a good idea, and many would legalize other recreational drugs, with any increase in deaths (addiction, violence) acceptable when weighed against other gains.

It is necessary for practical ethics and politics to think humans special among all the life on Earth, and good to believe that "Every human life is sacred and of infinite value" — but actual ethical decisions in real-world politics often require doing bloody arithmetic, and infinities don’t work there. 

We need a mature conversation on the gains and losses of opening schools to various degrees and in various ways, including what sometimes competing groups can agree would be "acceptable casualties" from doing so.

JOURNALISTIC OBJECTIVITY: A Technical point

Occasion: A program on The 1A show on WAMU of NPR from 9 June 2020:

When Journalists Say They’re Objective — What Does That Even Mean?

From Chemistry 101, day one, in 1961: "The observer is part of the system." So observers can't report on what "the system" — anything happening — is in itself, but only what it appears to be, as observed.

So even the best trained anthropologist can't tell you about The Village, but only — in one kind of work — the village with an anthropologist in it. An astronomer can't tell you some absolute truth about the Crab Nebula, but only the Crab Nebula as observed by a human being with a given set of senses and instruments. It's a good guess that observing the Crab Nebula from Earth isn't going to change it, but it could be that the most important thing about the Crab Nebula is going on in ways humans are going to have real problems observing.

This is a practical issue for reporters, most clearly a TV crew with lights at a demonstration where people in a crowd know they're at least potentially on camera and might make the evening news or a posted video. But even with a word reporter in the The New York Times there are issues, perhaps especially in the NYT and respectable publications in its tradition.

"NYT" style tends toward "omniscient narrator": the literary technique of telling a story with a narrator with a god-like overview and entry into people's thoughts and who doesn't identify himself or herself as a "self," and avoids using the word "I". So in that "objective" style you do get a form of transparency: pretending the reader looks through this transparent pane of a reporter and sees The Story in Itself.

Nah. The reporter is at best a kind of lens, and as said on the show the best the reporter can do is to work industriously and diligently and try to be open about any biases s/he'll bring to the picture — and try to be honest and accurate, which is hard enough without trying for the impossible of objectivity.

Also not desirable. If you want an idea of truly objective reporting — detached dealing with people as objects — think of a "nightcrawler" cameraman filming the carnage of an auto accident without helping, and when the reporter he's recording gets attacked for his cruel questioning of a survivor, just keeps on filming this new story.

Student Essay in the 1960s, Russian Interference in US Election 2016 — And "Misprision of Felony"

I learned the phrase "misprision of felony early in my teaching career when a student in Rhetoric 101 — think 1st semester College Composition — responded to a personal narrative assignment with the story of a young woman who'd joined heR friends in perjury and maybe insurance fraud in a context I've long-ago forgotten.

I sought advice from older colleagues and was told that since the event was in the past and directly harmed at most only a fictive individual — a corporation — and indirectly only their other customers for small sums, my duty to protect the confidentiality of student work outweighed my other social duties, and, if necessary, I should go to prison rather than betray the student/teacher relationship.

"Prison?" I asked.

I was told prosecution was highly unlikely, but it looked like a felony was committed, I had information about said felony, and, if I didn't report it, I might be guilty of "misprision of felony," at that place and time at least, itself a felony.

"Oh."

When the student came in for our "tutorial" conference, I started out with how we should talk a bit about her very nice development of the Persona of the essay, her "I", the protagonist-Narrator of the story who, in the story, committed perjury and what just might look like insurance fraud.

And after a moment for that to sink in, that is what we talked about.

Okay, so much for confession for me. (In my adult life I also advocated draft resistance and apparently violated Federal and possibly Provincial election law in Canada going with a group to have a great time in Toronto and informally advise on the Pierre Trudeau campaign. "But that was in another country, / And besides" — we yanks were with the George McGovern campaign and, as the US election worked out, maybe didn't have much advice to give.) But —

But what about the Family Trump and people representing Russia and the possibility that members of the 2016 Trump campaign new that a foreign entity or two were messing around in a US election. Is there "misprision of election-law violation"? Did they have a legal as well as a civic duty to report what could have been some sort of crime. Is even the non-action of silence a crime far more a crime here as it could have been for me as a writing teacher?

I did say I taught Rhetoric 101; so the question may be rhetorical.

The Dog at Reese

            I told this story repeatedly — possibly obsessively — for years. I needed to shape it into art. Not necessarily good art, but art: a story, a narrative, a made thing outside of myself, outside of me, something I could then deal with as part of my Self.

            Apparently, though, I never wrote it up or put it on my computer or on line.

            I will now.

            For sure it was in the summer, probably of 1963 or 1964, and I was in my late teens. And for sure I was working a summer job in the Gastro-Intestinal Research Lab at Chicago’s Michael Reese Hospital and Medical Center (“Reese,” now out of business). My official title was “Student,” and I was there, primarily, in theory, to work on a project to determine, “Would it be feasible to utilize strips of rat gut for the in vitro determination of the effects on stomach motility of various pharmaceuticals?” The answer was “No,” and my final report consisted of my writing out the question on a 3x5 or 4x6 notecard and gently telling my employers that if they’d done sufficient library research before assigning me the project they’d have known it’d been tried and never gotten to work — but guinea pig uterus would work. 

            Anyway, I had more time for the “Student” aspect of the job, which was primarily “To ask stupid questions.” I’d been represented to the precursors of a Human Resources department as someone who’d been trained in microbiology — which was true — but my boss knew I had switched over to a major in English. What he wanted was a young person from outside gastroenterology who’d ask intelligent but naïve questions and make him explain what they were doing. For thatI was definitely, and sometimes embarrassingly, qualified. 

            I also found a lot of time to read — much of research in the life sciences is waiting for timers to run out — and I helped doing whatever needed to be done.

            One morning what needed to be done included killing a dog who’d been the victim of an operation that went wrong. 

            I don’t know what the experiment was, but it involved a large incision in the dog’s rib cage, one that couldn’t be just sewn up. It had to be wired closed, and the wire had gotten kinked, which weakened it, which … — well, which resulted in the dog lying in our courtyard area with its ribcage open and in extreme distress.

            It was only years later that I learned the euphemism “put down” — one euphemism I approve of — and my memory is that I was asked to help kill the dog. Anyway, the more senior lab tech prepared the lethal injection, which consisted of a palm-full of Nembutal (pentobarbital) put into a large syringe and then adding water; and I went out into the courtyard, squatted down, and “popped the vein” on the dog’s left front leg. 

            And the other guy came out, injected the dog with enough barbiturate to quite literally kill a horse — and the dog didn’t die.

            Background 1: On the wall in each room of our lab was the code of ethics for dealing with experimental (nonhuman) animals, which stated that no animal was to be made or allowed to suffer more than or longer than necessary for the experiment.

            Background 2: Someone had put the wrong barbiturate in the Nembutal bottle. I don’t know what it was, but obviously it was something weaker, or maybe not a barbiturate at all.

            Background 3: For P.E. the preceding semester, I’d taken Personal Defense. I’m small and hardly excelled in the course, but one thing I was good at was what was called “the Japanese choke hold,” which undoubtedly has another name nowadays since the “Japanese” part may’ve been racist, and anyway it’s now the name of something pornographic (I didn’t click on the links that came up on a Google search). 

            Background 4: I grew up with dogs and very much like dogs and bond with dogs.

So I’m there still squatted down holding the leg of a dog trying desperately to breathe, and two thoughts go through my head simultaneously (although I must narrate them one after the other). I was an English major, already specializing in mostly-early drama, so I experienced this as a kind of Morality Play with the relatively good angel on one shoulder saying, so to speak — none of this was exactly in words — You canbreak this dog’s neck quickly and cleanly; therefore it is your duty to do so. And I started to straighten up — and then there was a very archaic voice saying, Yes. You’ve killed with a needle, but what does it feel like to kill with your hands?

            And about half-way up — I’m sure of this because my knees ached for the next few days — half-way up I froze and went into a kind of a fugue with the line from Murder in the Cathedral going through my mind, “The last temptation is the greatest treason: / 

To do the right deed for the wrong reason.”

            Eventually — I have no idea how long — the other lab tech came out with a different syringe, shook me, and we “put down” — killed — the dog.

            Two things.

            First, I understand better than most people that line in Murder in the Cathedraland what it means in the context of T. S. Eliot’s verse drama about martyrdom and what it can mean in a situation like mine with The Dog at Reese. This is good because it puts me in a strong position to say that in most other contexts, certainly most political contexts, Eliot’s line is beautifully-written bullshit. Far better generally is the idea in Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well, “The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together […].” People’s motivations are complex, and with most people, most of the time, if they’re doing the right thing, just accept that, sometimes with gratitude. 

            Second, however flawed and outdated Carl Jung’s analytical psychology may be, he’s on to something with the concept of the Shadow. I’ve met mine. And I have tried to make him mine: a part of me that on at least one occasion took charge to do a good deed. It was not a great good deed, but it was good and it was done by me, including the Shadow-me, using the strength of that archaic, dark voice. 

            And that’s pretty much it. That’s the story and most of what I’ve learned from it. 

Other results …? Well, for ecological and ethical reasons, in part, I don’t eat mammal meat; but also because of that dog and other dogs and — unmentioned by the Shadow-voice — the rats I killed to get the gut to make the strips to answer the question of my unnecessary project. (Although it would have saved the lives of many rats and guinea pigs if one rat gut could make many strips to test “various pharmaceuticals.”) Also, it helped radicalize me as they used to say in the late 1960s, although I didn’t see my position as all that radical. It was just, “Don’t kill complex organisms — humans especially (although that may be just sentimental) — unless you really, really have to.” Not, say, out of pride or greed or wrath or gluttony — for four of the old Seven Deadly Sins— or nationalist fervor or only following orders or because some part of you is sincerely, deadly curious, “What is it like to kill with your hands?”

            Well, and I — basically a good human being, as humans go — remember and appreciate the upshot of a great line from a so-so play, “The web of our life is of a mingled yarn, good and ill together […].”

National Security Issues Generally and Terrorism Specifically Are Political Issues (Back to a Very Basic "Basic")

I'm going to disagree with an assertion I heard on a very respectable NPR program this morning that national security issues — with protection from terrorism most immediately in question — aren't, or shouldn't be, political. They are political, and should be. 

Let's go back to one really basic point among the Basics.

Among the ways we humans divide up, there is the Soft-Hearted School that says at an extreme that human life, or at least the lives of Americans, is/are of infinite value, and "If it saves just one American life, it's worth it." Opposed to that is the Hard-Headed school that asks just what "it" we are talking about and how much "it" costs, including costs in terms of other values, such as freedom.

That gets us into questions that are difficult and dangerous — involving philosophy, theology, religion, and really basic values — and political.

Most Americans would be safer in a police state, so if safety is an absolute good, let's move toward a police state. But "most Americans" isn't all Americans, and some people would be a whole lot less safe in a police state. Which gets us into politics: Who pays for that safety, in several senses of the word "pays," and who profits?

            If you don't get the point of the question, ask around among Black Americans, or families with memories of escaping the secret police and/or death squads of the Czar, KGB, Shah, Stasi, Pinochet government, and so on for a substantial list.

Most Americans would be safer in a police state, but necessarily less free. Which gets us into safety vs. liberty — and again into politics.

One can and should believe each individual life of infinite value, but when practical matters come up, people must be willing to suspend that belief. For a prime example where it is necessary to do so, it is a moral imperative to perform triage, which can mean selecting whom to treat and possibly save, whom to let die. If every life is of infinite value, and we're talking the same sort of infinities here, it becomes impossible to do the bloody arithmetic of choosing to let even one person die that others might live. If you're going to perform the ethical imperative of minimizing casualties and suffering when you can, you find yourself deciding — as a practical matter then and there —the STAR TREKian question of the needs of the few or the one vs. those of the many.

Personally, I'm of the pragmatic school and hold that the sanctity of human life is a fundamental and absolutely necessary myth, but necessarily mythic: the belief requires either the Leap into the Absurd of believing in a caring God who chose human beings to be special; or the belief requires the outright absurdity of thinking that human beings on our own have some sort of special value.

            As the Bible saith, or Koheleth the Preacher, anyway, saith, in a stretch of Scripture rarely quoted by the pious,

I said in my heart with regard to the sons of men that God is testing them to show them that they are but beasts.  For the fate of the sons of men and the fate of beasts is the same; as one dies, so dies the other. They all have the same breath, and man has no advantage over the beasts; for all is vanity [=emptiness].  All go to one place; all are from the dust, and all turn to dust again. Who knows whether the spirit of man goes upward and the spirit of the beast goes down to the earth? (Ecclesiastes 3.10-21)

It is very dangerous to deny the sanctity of even a single human life and sacrifice one for the survival of the group. It is also sometimes necessary. It is dangerous to assert the rights of privacy and movement and to put at risk the lives of Americans, including American children: lives that could be saved by government surveillance and freewheeling policing. If we wish to retain some privacy and freedom of movement, if we wish freedom from government control, we wish upon ourselves risk.

We don't have to resolve these issues, and we can't. We can try to balance various good things and risks and argue about the balance. That is, we can, and do, engage in politics.

W.E.I.R.D. Science — and Ethics and Politics

            The joke on campus when I was "in the academy" was that our colleagues in the Psych Biz had given us (largely) the psychology of the American college sophomore. American and other academic psychologists are starting to take the joke more seriously, trying to figure out how to adjust to having a subject pool from backgrounds that are largely W.E.I.R.D.: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic. Most people in the world are not WEIRD; indeed, large numbers of Americans don't hit all those elements. Among the majority of people — historically a substantial majority — the "R" wouldn't be "Rich" but "Religious (more or less)."

            Being oblivious to religion can have results ranging from silly to disastrous.

            Local example: Southern California Edison Electric Company scheduled a power outage for my neighborhood for 10 PM Saturday, 15 April 2017, through 6 AM on the 16th. Sunday, 16 April 2017 was Easter Sunday, and apparently the schedulers at SoCal Edison were ignorant of the custom among many Ventura County natives to have family and friends over for Easter eating and would have refrigerators loaded with food that weekend, in some cases too much food to tolerate up to 8 hours without power — if everything went well during the maintenance work and to say nothing about having a crew working extra hours on Easter weekend.

            So come on, SoCal Ed! There'd be an excuse if you had to calculate on your own Easter's falling on the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. But you don't; nowadays you check a calendar a month or so after you spot Easter stuff sprouting up at Kroger's or six weeks after those dumb-ass Cadbury Crème Egg commercials start showing up on television.

            California Christians can't complain about persecution, but there's definitely insensitivity, indifference, and ignorance.

            More significant example: No plan for "peace in the Mideast" will work that assumes that Jerusalem is just a city and that the key issues in the conflicts are rational interests in land, water, resources generally and so forth— and ignores religion, ethnic identities, self-respect, and self-respect's sinful sibling, Pride.

            Significant for capital "D" Democrats in the United States: No plan to regain majority-party power — not membership or sympathies or numbers in polling, but power — will work unless it gets more people to vote Democratic who are Western(ized)/White or White-ish, schooled a bit but not overly Educated, recently de-industrialized, and far less Rich by world standards than Religious.

            So come on, Democrats! You should know this stuff at least for the Abrahamic religions — and if you're culturally educated, not just schooled, you should know which ones the "Abrahamic religions" are. For example: in the Hebrew Bible, the 24^th Psalm begins, "The Earth is the Eternal's, and all that it contains, / The sea and all that dwell therein; / For He has founded it upon the ocean, and upon the flood." The psalmist assumes a labor theory of property: something is yours if you make it, with your labor, not as an investment or because you're Pharaoh ordering around forced labor by your peasants in the off-season, and slaves. And from there you can go on to the Prophets on social justice and, explicitly with Christians, indirectly with others get to the parts on basic decency spelled out in Matthew 25.

            We are all "values" voters, and if people accept those basics on our absolute human duties — and Jews, Christians, and Muslims damn well should — you ought to be able to get them to vote those values.

On US Seal Team 6's killing civilians in the raid on Yemen, 28 January 2017:

         * It was alleged on the National Public Radio Show 1A International, Friday, 3 Feb. 2017, that one or more of the women killed in the fire-fight picked up a weapon and fired back, hence becoming a combatant. The reporter who mentioned that had been embedded with US troops in raids. If the unit he was with had been attacked and he picked up the weapon of a dead combatant, he would become a combatant and could not only be shot in a fire-fight but would be likely to be executed afterward if he were taken prisoner or, if lucky, held as an unauthorized enemy combatant. 

         * The very large context is that holding civilians off-limits for killing is a norm that comes and goes, The point of much medieval raiding was to murder the serfs of an opposing lord, thereby cutting off a source of the enemy lord's income. And it was perfectly proper for much of history to treat as the victor wished the survivors of a town that had resisted, was besieged, and then successfully stormed — to say nothing of the point of a siege of reducing a population to starvation and despair. More recently, the area bombing of World War II was obviously going to kill off a large number of civilians, as was the carpet bombing by the US in Vietnam (etc.). Drones and relatively "smart" munitions are a kind of progress for targeted homicide, except insofar as their greater accuracy is a temptation to use them where just blowing the hell out of someplace with "dumb" munitions would be too obvious a PR loss (not to mention moral issues).

          * One difference between civilian deaths with drone strikes (etc.) under President Obama and with President Donald Trump is that Mr. Trump is on record approving of killing the families of (alleged) terrorists. When a raid occurs where family members are killed, a not-necessarily-correct but legitimate inference is that those who accused Mr. Trump of running a misleading campaign for US President owe him at least one apology: this is a campaign promise he's kept. And those of us who place conscious evil above the banal kind should condemn less the conscious killing of women and children to a casual acceptance of "collateral damage." 
                     (In Dante's Inferno, the "Trimmers" who were neither good nor evil but just for themselves and "blew with the wind" don't make it into Hell proper "For the wicked would have some glory over them" — since the wicked at least chose. The principle applies to those who euphemize killing non-combatants and obfuscate that choosing to drop high explosives in an area with civilians is a decision to kill/risk killing civilians. Also, if you celebrate your side's intentionally killing young men on their side and revel in body-counts, don't get too vocal about unintended killing of old people, women, and children: that's sentimentality, not ethics — or Machiavellian propaganda.)