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.

Values Voters

In those days there was no king in Israel.

Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.

— Judges 17.6 (ESV)

            Puberty as such wasn't a trauma for me. I recall during my first shave, or an early one, catching a glimpse of my mother watching me, with her looking pleased and a little proud. Shortly thereafter, my father came up to me and gave me, let's say, a complimentary-size box of condoms (many more than I'd use by the time I left home) and delivered the fatherly advice, "Until you know what to do with it, keep it in your pants."

            What was jarring, my real loss of innocence, was when it hit me at about age fourteen, "Everybody feels justified!" Even then, I knew that was hyperbole and overgeneralization, even if I didn't know those terms: we often do things we know or believe are wrong, and we feel guilty. Still, I was surprised and a little shocked and upset to realize that people doing some nasty shit, including to me, felt justified: some guy hurting others, including possibly me, was doing "what was right in his own eyes."

            This was hardly a new observation, and I've since gotten it reinforced frequently. Shakespeare's Othello (1604) murders his wife for honor, and a murderer in Dennis Lehane's Mystic River (2001) is consciously specific about feeling justified in his crime. Indeed, in a number of books I've listened to recently — and in a couple cases went so far as to buy hard copy — in at least two cases, the argument is made explicitly that many "evil-doers" from petty thieves to international war criminals do what they do to right what they feel as an injustice.

            And, of course, in cases where it is the law that is wicked, criminals can do what is right in their own eyes and be right.

            Runaway slaves were stealing their masters' property, and after the passage of the US Fugitive Slave Act, anyone who helped them broke the law. Similarly with those Righteous Gentiles who helped Jews escape the Nazis, and, of course, any Jew who escaped the State-sanctioned policies of slavery and then death.

            We should keep this in mind if the discussion in the US heats up again on "Values Voters" and "Religious Voters.

            I'll take the second phrase first, because the clarification has been done for me by Henry Fielding with his satire of the Reverend Mr. Thwackum's position in the great line in Tom Jones (1749), "When I say religion, I mean the Christian religion, and when I say the Christian religion, I mean the Protestant religion, and when I say the Protestant religion, I mean the Church of England!" Ten to fifteen minutes listening to attacks on attacks on "religion" will make clear that "religion" usually means the religion of the speaker, not so much the Episcopal Church in America nowadays, but many of the churches and traditions and sects from Evangelical Christianity to Salafist Islam — and on.

            A caveat here, though: sometimes "Religious Voters" means just what it says, and differentiates between voters who take their religion seriously — for a wide swath of religious beliefs — and differentiates them from people who are secular. Or, in the United States, "Religious Voters" can refer to those who couldn't reliably tell you the basic tenets of any religion but have a traditional American commitment to a generalized faith in God and country and tradition, without thinking much about any of them — although this variety of "Religious Voter" can despise the secular with more vehemence than those who know about religion. (Indeed, Pope Francis knows a whole lot about religion and speaks loudly against greedy materialism, not so much against secular philosophical materialism.)

            It's scary that horrible people often feel completely justified, and, indeed, it's almost a matter of definition that psychopaths don't feel guilty at all about the harm they cause. On the other hand, it's just a given that most of us most of the time act according to our values. Sometimes a tragic hero (female as well as male) will see that something is wrong but doing it anyway — and ditto for more normal people. And sometimes we just fuck up. But most of us, most of the time are "Values Deciders" in our considered action, and rarely more so than when actually voting.

            Even as Mr. Thwackum was narrow-minded in limiting "religion" to, finally, his own Church of England, even so people are narrow-minded in denying values to people whose values differ. Or, putting the same point differently, "The Moral Majority" of the 20^th century wasn't against an "Immoral Minority" so much as against other groups operating from different moral codes.

            And sometimes our oppositions are even deeper than fairly conscious moral codes or ethical systems and get into "world-views" and the basic myths — in the anthropological sense — that help us organize our dealings with the world.

            Here we need to be cautious.

            It pisses me off when Right-wingers passing themselves off as conservatives — there's nothing conservative about capitalism! — it pisses me off when hyperventilating people on the American Right praise "Values Voters" and/or "Religious Voters" and exclude those of us with other values and other religions.

            On the other hand, it's not always a good idea to be too explicit about just how radically (from the roots) we disagree on issues such as the history and nature of the universe and what we mean by such words as "liberty," "freedom," "country" and "honor." And clearly it can be risky to get specific about how much we disagree about even such relatively superficial things as the causes of the US Civil War and what is signified by the Confederate flag and the word "heritage" for the States, both Confederate and United.

            If you truly believe the "Heavens and the Earth" were created some 5775 years ago (Jewish count) in six days by a God who crowned creation with humankind, you are going to have a different world view from those who have as their creation myth The Big Bang of some 13.77 billion years ago followed a universe evolving in a way that happened, eventually, to produce us — along with innumerable other entities and species of importance equal to us, and some (a galaxy, say) a whole lot bigger.

            If you firmly believe that human beings are essentially souls to be saved and this life but a brief pilgrimage to heaven or hell — then you will and should have practical views different from those of us — who may include the author of Koheleth ("Ecclesiastes") in the Bible — who are pretty sure this life is all there is.

            If you accept as a tenet of faith that the Christian Scriptures are "inerrant in their original autographs" and that the King James translation pretty well says in English what those originals said; if you believe that the teachings of Jesus and the Apostles and the example of the Primitive Church established a Way for the saved then and until the end of time — then you're going to have different values from people who don't know what the hell what I just wrote means.

            So: Right-wing folk in America, please stop talking vaguely about "attacks on religion" and try to get specific about just what the attacks and conflicts are. And please don't talk of yourselves as "Values Voters" as if the rest of us didn't have values.

            But, yet again, all of us: Turn down the volume and the passion and the heat. We have serious disagreements, and the seriousness is all the more reason to practice care, humility, and compassion.

            We're not far in much of the world from large-scale wars of religion between Sunni and Shia. We don't need literal culture war in the US. We need to play nice, compromise where we can, find friends where possible, and at least tolerate otherwise decent people who are so benighted as to disagree with us.

            Criminals who are obviously hurting people and feel justified doing it — those folk we can get together and try to hold in check.

Government Dysfunction and The Federated Nations of America (28 Dec. 2013)

 Both difference and similarity are in the eye of the beholder;

it depends only on how long and how deep he cares to look. 

— Rich Erlich .ca. 1963

      In Ursula K. Le Guin's ambiguous utopia The Dispossessed (1974; ch. 6) and in her 1994 story "Solitude," we get the idea that "a planet looks smooth," to the naked eye "from orbit," and elegantly simple. The closer you get, though, the rougher the surface appears, and more complex. There's a similar idea in Herman Melville's Moby Dick (1851), where we have various views of different levels of the ocean. Looking down from the ship's deck at the ocean surface, you might see "vast meadows of brit, the minute, yellow substance, upon which the Right Whale largely feeds. For leagues and leagues it undulated round us, so that we seemed to be sailing through boundless fields of ripe and golden wheat" (ch. 58). If you contemplate the ocean from the masthead, however, and go into a Transcendental reverie and fall into the water, you'll drown (ch. 35), or if you fall in from the deck while looking down at a whale carcass, you might not have a chance to drown but get more gorily dead, torn apart by sharks (ch. 66). Or if you become a "Castaway" and look into the depths long enough and deeply enough, you might see "God's foot upon the treadle of the loom" and speak it, and be called — and be — mad (ch. 93)>. Or, in the deepest depths, you might see whales making love, or "the nursing mothers of the whales" (ch. 87).

      The point is not that planets are really smooth or rough, or that the nature of the ocean, or universe, is beautiful or malign. One crucial point for both Le Guin and Melville (among other points) isn't that any of these views are wrong but that all are incomplete.
      I've been thinking about such matters listening again to Colin Woodard's 2012 American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America, or at least the US, Canadian, and northern Mexican parts of North America (minus the southern tip of Florida, the figurative foreskin of North America, which is "Part of the Spanish Caribbean").

      From some place between the Moon and Mars, Earth to the naked human eye would look like one round ball, maybe a little flattened but smooth and unified and uniform. To the figurative eyes of a visitor from somewhere well beyond Mars, human culture might look like "Terran culture": a culture for all the humans on Earth. As I've joked, to a silicon-based life-form with a sensorium totally alien from ours, all us carbon-based creatures might _______ alike (where you fill in a word impossible for us to pronounce that designates a set of sense of which we cannot conceive) — and he/she/it, a truly alien Alien, might need a lot of practice to tell a human from a horse or hibiscus.

      Colin Woodard doesn't take a really close-up view of North American cultures, since really fine-grain analysis would show differences county to county in the USA — hell, differences among neighborhoods where I grew up! — nor does he back off so much that it might make sense to talk of "American Culture" or "Euro-American culture," much less "Terran."

      He is, however, working from a well-chosen distance, and one that yields results I find believable and, in a time of continuing culture conflict and governmental dysfunction, highly important and useful.

      I grew up in the Lake View District of Chicago and went to college in Champaign County in central Illinois, except for a year in upstate, quite rural New York State. I currently live in Ventura County, California, an area between Los Angeles and Santa Barbara.

      Chicago is a border city according to Woodard, in "Yankeedom" but just north of "The Midlands": i.e., on the border between the now secularized successors to the New England Calvinist Puritan Yankees and what you'll recognize as "Middle America." Going to the University of Illinois, I passed from very much the Land of Lincoln and mildly Leftist Democrats through modern moderate Republicans — not the postmodern radical variety — and into "Greater Appalachia": the University of Illinois was and remains a Yankee/Midlands enclave in the Bible Belt.

      At Cornell U in Ithaca, New York, I lived in a fraternity house with a number of Jews from New York City, with "the City," as New Yorkers called it, the heart of the geographically very small nation Woodard calls "New Netherland": a diverse, tolerant, and very commercial kind of place. Ithaca, New York, is another enclave, in Yankeedom, perhaps, but bordering on The Midlands and with a lot of big-city folk at the University. All around Ithaca and Cornell, though, is an area somewhat-local boy Scott Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist, summed up with a quote from one of his grammar school friends who'd shot a squirrel: "It had fur; I had a gun; end of story." Campaign County, Illinois, is farming country; Tomkins County, New York (home of Cornell U), though, is country country: really rural and in some places proudly redneck.

      When I returned to the U of I from Cornell, driving my new (for me) highly-used used car I bought from a Cornellian from the City, I had to get those — sorry, them — New York plates off fast, and when I went for car repairs I had to drop my Chicago accent and speak the way we did "Right cheer in Champaign cahnty" (and the spellings there are phonetically correct, or at least close).

      There are indeed three main North American subcultures in Illinois (Woodard's "nations"), and three or four in New York State, and I had to learn to move among them.

      In Ventura County, CA, things are equally complex.

      In California terms, I live in "south-central-coastal California," and that thoroughly pedantic phrase is necessary. Woodard has my area as part of "El Norte," which is northern Mexico and the southern tiers of California and Arizona, and, reasonably enough, much of New Mexico and Texas — with a substantial salient into Colorado. If I get on Amtrak's Coast Starlight and head north by train to see relatives in San José and friends in the Bay area, Greater Portland, and on up to Vancouver, BC — which I've done — I've hit and traveled through "The Left Coast," which needs no explanation. If I get in the car and head east from the Pacific coast, I'm very soon in "The Far West": Barry Goldwater territory for you older readers, cowboy country for everyone.

      Woodard's count may be wrong, and some of his borders may be off, but he's working from a useful "distance" in viewing the Federated Nations of America, USA division, and our neighbors and fellow-nationals in Canada and Mexico. (Hey, I feel more at home in Toronto, Ontario, part of "The Midlands" and a Great-Lakes City like Chicago, than I do in Charleston, South Carolina, part of the Deep South). And what Woodard and his predecessors in this field have to tell us is important.

      We are not "one nation under God" to start with because we are not a nation at all — not in the way Japan or Norway are nations — and also because saying that we are or are not exceptionally chosen by God is likely to start an argument among your fellow Americans.

      The United Kingdom has managed to muddle along for a good while now confederating at least three nations, four if count Northern Ireland — though where I grew up we most certainly did not — and there's no reason to think the American Federation will break up any time soon. The unpleasantness of the 1860's is not something most Americans want to repeat, however much some Deep South folk (and others) regret the Lost of Cause in resisting "The War of Northern Aggression" and might welcome a re-match: In The Great Big Book of Horrible Things (2012), Matthew White gives the death toll of the Civil War as 620,000 military and 75,000 civilians (p. [299]), so a second go-round seems like bad policy.

      Short of a break-up, the American nations necessarily will need to live together, and such "peaceful coexistence" may require a convoluted strategy of Double Think where most of the time we pretend that we don't have a confrontation of subcultures working from very different world-views, assumptions, and premises — while at other times we acknowledge that many of our practical, mundane disagreements stem from serious differences, differences with deep roots in our histories, ethnographies, ideologies, and values.

      If the English, Scots, and Welsh can go a couple centuries without murdering one another in large numbers — and if the various varieties of French have long refrained from slitting each others' throats — we, too, we various American nations, may muddle through. Meanwhile, let's get moving again on significant reductions in nuclear armaments: much of the US military is Deep South and Appalachian, and if we're moving toward Civil War II, I'd prefer they didn't have nukes.