Uncategorized – Page 4 – Random Thoughts

Darwin’s Error

If the Golden Rule could be said to be the encapsulation of the fundamental meaning of both Judaism and Christianity, then perhaps we could say that the fundamental meaning of evolution is summed up in Darwin’s phrase “the survival of the fittest.” Over the years it has been trotted out by the perpetrators to explain/excuse such things as colonialism, slavery, the Holocaust, and the modern tendency of large businesses to cannibalize smaller ones, among countless other evils. Parenthetically it has always seemed curious to me that we are apparently helpless in the face of a law of nature when we wish to excuse behavior that would otherwise be morally repugnant, while we will bend every effort to successfully overcome equally intractable laws such as the law of gravity when it is more profitable to do so.

The problem is that survival of the fittest is a misstatement (or rather an overstatement) which when corrected does not in fact support any of the evils mentioned. It is ironic in our test-obsessed world that it is the removal of a “test” that reveals the true meaning. All of the requirements of the theory of evolution are fulfilled in the expression “the survival of the fit.” What a difference this simple modification makes. Now it is no longer necessary for you to die in order to ensure my survival. As long as we are both “fit” then we can both survive. We must also consider the proper meaning of the word “fit.” We tend to think of the modern dominant meaning, which is roughly equivalent to strong or robust. This gives even greater force to the misunderstanding, as it would seem to rationalize the tyranny of the strong over the weak. In Darwin’s time, however, the dominant meaning of the word fit was “appropriate”, as in “a meal fit for a king.”

So now we have a natural law that promises survival of the appropriate, which in no way conflicts with the theory of evolution. How does this change our outlook? For one thing it puts a very big hole in the idea that unfettered competition is the most desirable business model, on the grounds that it gives natural selection the opportunity to determine which businesses survive. If we remove the requirement that the survivors be the fittest, and only require that they be appropriate, then a strong case can be made for cooperation rather than competition as being the most appropriate behavior.

Minimum Basic Income

A commonly heard argument against the idea of a basic minimum income is that if everyone were given their living without having to work for it, nobody would work and civilization would collapse. Those advancing this argument tend to be members of the ownership class, and no doubt to them it seems reasonable. Why would anyone work if they did not have to for the sake of survival? Fortunately we do not have to speculate. We have a convenient study population who have in fact been given their living (and, in fact, considerably in excess of a basic living, which if the concept were harmful might be presumed to increase the harm.) Moreover we have data going back centuries and across a wide variety of cultures. I am referring to the children of the wealthy classes.

Do we find that these people tend to sit around and do nothing useful, or pursue lives of dissipation? Some of them, even many, do indeed. Yet virtually all of the discoveries and philosophical theories that led to the Enlightenment, the age of science and the Industrial Revolution were made by people from this class. They were the ones with time and leisure to pursue studies without having to give consideration to earning a living from them. Very few indeed of those who gave their names to systems of measurement (Volt, Ampere, Pascal) or scientific theories (Darwin, Freud) came from the poorer classes.

The situation is similar with respect to music and the arts. It is much easier to pursue success in these fields when you do not have to work a job after school, and when your parents can afford private lessons and top of the line equipment. My point, though, is not (here at least) to bemoan the unfair advantage the affluent have over everyone else, but rather to illustrate that people in the fortunate position of not having to earn a living do not have a general tendency to sit around and do nothing, and, to the contrary, such people are responsible for most of the advances that have given us, for better or for worse, the world we live in.

A defender of aristocracies might say that all of this simply indicates the inherent superiority of the upper classes. They made all the great discoveries because they are smarter then the rest of the population. However there is no correlation between wealth and intelligence, and geniuses of all kinds seem to be distributed evenly across the whole population. The plain fact is that enhanced opportunity yields better outcomes.

If some mad experimenter were to secretly take 100 random newborn infants from African refugee camps, and exchange them for 100 random upper middle class American infants, other than perhaps standing out by their skin color each would grow up a more or less typical product of the environment on which they were raised. If even race is not determinative of talent or the ability to lead a useful life, social class or a wealthy background certainly is not.

Neither are natural talent or hard work and application sure roads to success. They certainly help, but the world is full of starving geniuses. The single talent that does enormously enhance the probability of success is the talent for handling money, or what we call business sense. Someone with this particular skill can succeed even without any other skills, but someone lacking it will seldom succeed even if they are otherwise highly skilled.

The most important factor in determining success in life is opportunity. That opportunity might be the result of having a wealthy family, or it may be some stroke of good fortune, a chance meeting with someone in a position to give a hand up or any of a thousand possible scenarios that might make the difference between success and failure. Someone who does not get such a boost has a much harder time rising up the social scale.

There is every reason to suppose that among the poor and dispossessed of the world are countless Mozarts, Einsteins, Aristotles that will never have the chance even to know their talents, much less use them in the world, and there is every reason to suppose that if everyone in the world had a chance to shine we could usher in a new golden age.

Answers to Frequently Encountered Objections

I have often proposed radical social changes, and I have met with several kinds of objection that do not address the actual proposal and its benefits and shortcomings, but rather give general reasons why such reforms are impractical or undesirable. These kinds of arguments are not confined to the socio-political sphere. Any new and unfamiliar idea, including revolutionary inventions, are liable to be met with the same kinds of argument. I will use as an example the notion that we should abandon the practice of personal inheritance. Please be clear that in this particular essay I am not arguing the case for this point of view, but rather attempting to show how certain kinds of objection are invalid as a response to the proposal.

It does not solve all the problems. Theodore Roosevelt in 1886 denounced men who mistakenly believed that “at this stage of the world’s progress it is possible to make everyone happy by an immense social revolution.” This is what is known as a straw man argument. He is mischaracterizing the views of his opponents. Of course those interested in social reforms realize that even if they were successful it would not make everyone in the world happy, but that is not a reason to oppose improving the situation. All that the proponents of reform need to show is that sufficient good will come of it to more than counterbalance whatever harm may do, and to make it worth the cost.

Another common objection we often hear is “well, you can devise all the social systems you want but you cannot overcome human nature.” What is usually meant by this is that greed and laziness will always ruin whatever system we come up with, and the implication is that for this reason it is not even worth putting much time into the issue unless we can come up with a way of changing human nature.

First, the idea that greed is an uncontrollable force is wrong. It is no more uncontrollable that lust and violence, and we have done quite a good job that of corralling those immutable forces by our laws and social structures. That is really the whole point of those institutions in fact. As we settled down into societies we found that certain kinds of behavior cannot be condoned in a civilized society, so we made rules to control those kinds of behaviors. To claim the preeminence of personal freedom to oppose the making of laws, to say “I should be free to make my own choices with being told what to do” is to miss the point. All behaviors forbidden by laws are things people would like to be free to do; if people did not have any desire to do something, there would be no need to forbid it. Greed is socially harmful, just as is violence, and we need to take step to make it socially unacceptable.

Laziness is another matter. We are told that if you gave people their basic living needs the would not bother to work at all. It is implied that people (especially poor people) are fundamentally lazy. I do not believe this to be true. I believe that people are fundamentally curious, and have a strong desire to better themselves, and make a contribution. In fact one of the most basic human needs is to feel useful. This, in my opinion, is at the root of much that is wrong with our society: young people growing up in poor neighborhoods see no prospect of improvement. They see, correctly, that the game is overwhelmingly stacked against them. The only people like them who seem to have any kind of success are those who make it in show business, sports or crime. Since most do not have the talent for the first two, many fall into the third path. The remainder live lives of low level hopelessness.

Imagine a world in which everyone had a chance at starting a business. Suppose at a certain age, and having fulfilled certain conditions, we were given a workspace and tools and materials and whatever resources were needed to carry out whatever occupation we decided to pursue. When we started to become profitable, a portion of the profit would go to repay what we had been given. If we were unsuccessful, the tools and materials remaining would go back into the common stock of resources, and the space given to someone else. Under such a system the young would take a very different attitude towards their education. They would see that there was a very real and valid reason to acquire knowledge and skills.

Human beings are curiosity machines. Observe an infant at play: you will see a study in experimentation and learning. If older students are lackadaisical in school, it can only be because we have somehow managed to eradicate their drive to learn. The only force that can achieve this is a sense of hopelessness. Give children hope and the confidence that their work will be rewarded, and see them blossom.

And finally, even if the theory of laziness were in some cases true, so what? Suppose a percentage of people are in fact lazy and would prefer to just stay home and play video games. At least they would not need to cheat and steal in order to do so. Right now these same people cost us a fortune in police and the justice system and mass incarceration and emergency health care. It would be far cheaper and less socially destructive to just pay them to stay home.

Science vs Intuitive Understanding

From an online discussion on waccobb.net

claire ossenbeck wrote:

Every time there is a major earthquake, they come out with some statement that says their clues to understanding have been tossed on the heap and they pretty much have to start anew. Before the North Ridge quake they believed that the faults were not connected to each other. I read this in a science mag. Then after the quake they find that omg, they are connected, quite! Ok, now here am I for years now, an absolute nobody, thinking to myself (purely intuitively) I think that they are connected because it’s just common sense to me and it feels right. It may not have been based on the science of the day, but if science does not understand that which it cannot measure or prove, and is needing to continuously upgrade itself, then where’s the proof that I’m wrong?

Among the many non-experts who thought about earthquakes, and had an intuitive understanding about some aspect of the subject, a certain number thought as you did, and were eventually proved to have been right. However I am sure that there were many who had some other intuitive insight that did not turn out to be right. Which one should we have followed? Back then, when they had it wrong and you had it right, what would you have had them do?

Should they have said to themselves (and to us) “Claire is quite sure that it is this way, and we should change our views to conform with hers!”? Clearly not, since there are myriad Claires, and they do not all have the same intuitive understanding, yet they are all equally certain.

What they did was what science does: continue to study the matter with as open a mind as they could manage (they are, after all, human, and prone to human weaknesses) and when they accumulated evidence that they were wrong, they changed their views and told us that they had been wrong, and now understood things to work differently than they had thought. Do you ever stop to consider how rare and courageous an act that is, to admit that you have been wrong? Yet that is what science does regularly, as better tests are devised and new theories tested and knowledge is more widely disseminated by communications technology improvements.

I think that perhaps you are under a false impression of what “science” is saying. If you had had the opportunity to talk to a reputable earthquake specialist at the time when the accepted view disagreed with your intuitive sense of what was the truth, he or she would probably have said something like “Well, that is a possibility, and may indeed be true, however the information we have right now seems to indicate otherwise.” Under appropriate circumstances the response might be “Well, what you propose is not impossible, but it has been studied so much with so much agreement that we consider the likelihood very low.” Even then they may turn out to have been mistaken; in almost no case will a reputable and honest scientist claim to know for certain that anything is either definitely right or definitely wrong. However, it is not up to science to prove that you are wrong; if they had to do that for every theory that came along, they would not have time for anything else. If you want to have your theory adopted it is up to you to provide the evidence, not just the assertion, that you are right.

As in all pursuits, there are individual scientists who care more about their ego or reputation than about the truth, but this is not true of science or scientists in general, any more than it is true of doctors or engineers in general, or of medicine or engineering as professions. You are of course quite free to believe that your theory is true and the accepted one false, just as I am sure there were earthquake scientists who also disagreed. Nobody was or is trying to stop you believing that. The difference is that the views of “science” (as opposed to the views of individual scientists) represents the distilled knowledge, tested and verified, of many people who have studied the matter. Even then as we have seen, they can be wrong. However, unlike people whose views rest solely on faith (and are therefore not really interested in evidence), when presented with new information that checks out, science will change its views.

So if occasionally science comes around to a point of view you already held, you are allowed a smile of satisfaction, and even a modest boast, but at the same time it is always salutary to remember the ideas you had that did not turn out to be supported by the evidence after all.

Refuting Libertarianism

Rather than a left-right scale the political spectrum should be seen as an up-down scale. The Republican Party represent the interests of those at the top of the scale, and the Democrats those at the bottom. It is often said that both parties are equally corrupt and beholden to money interests, but I do not believe this to be true. As I see it, each party has an agenda it wishes to promote, and also things it does reluctantly in order to continue to get elected. For the Republican Party what it wishes to do is serve the interests of their wealthy sponsors. What it does reluctantly in order to gain votes is the bare minimum of social programs it can get away with. For the Democrats it is the opposite. What they want to do is the social programs, and what they have to do reluctantly in order to find their campaigns is some of the bidding of the wealthy. So even in the present deplorable system there is a difference that matters between the parties.

Libertarians, often seen as being on the far right (or on my scale the top) actually do not really fit there. The reason they find common cause with Republicans is because both favor smaller government, but for quite different reasons. Libertarians believe in small government as a central principle, seeing the natural state of people as being rugged individualist as unfettered as possible by the law. Republicans just want to get the law off the backs of their sponsors, so they defund those parts of the government that have oversight over the big money interests.

The fundamental fallacy of libertarianism is easily demonstrated. One of the universal behaviors common to all of our species is the forming of groups. We are a highly social species, and the idea of a single individual living completely independently without any dependence upon others is almost unheard of. Even in the “wild west” days, the heyday of rugged individualism, they could not have survived, let alone thrived, without the railroads and the Sears Roebuck catalog. We are each a member of countless groups simultaneously: family, congregation, team, work environment, town, county, state, country each claim us as members. Some groups we choose to join, others we are members of willy nilly. Among the latter groups are the various levels of society that we inhabit.

So what does it mean to be a member of a group? What is the nature of our relationship to the group, and to other members of the group? The first and most important thing to understand about all groups is that by their very nature they limit the freedom of action of their members. This is a universal rule of groups of all kinds. In order to gain the benefits of belonging to the group, its members agree to accept limitations on their personal freedom of action. One might even say that the expression ” a free society” is an oxymoron, as the whole point of society is to limit the freedom of its members.

In the case of society, the limits on the freedom of action of its members are codified as systems of laws. The more organized and complex a society becomes, and the larger the populations being governed, the more restrictions are needed for society to continue to function. It makes no sense to say, as the Libertarians do, that personal freedom is the ultimate good, and the closer you can get to that the better. Instead we should accept the fact that society is not just useful but necessary, and that we need to seek the optimal balance between the desires of the individual members and the quite legitimate needs of the society.

Why Government?

Government is the process by which we decide how we are going to operate as a community. It is very instructive to watch the TV series Deadwood, which is the story of an outlaw town, outside the limits of what was then the US, that was a haven for people who wanted to live outside the legal system. For any number of reasons they felt too constricted by laws and rules and regulations (frequently the particular laws against such entrepreneurial enterprise as robbing banks and killing people,) and wanted to live somewhere they could be free of such restrictions. Of course a couple of out of control fires soon convinces the more reflective members of the population that if the town is to survive at all, there have to be some rules. A Fire Marshall is appointed, and so it begins. Before you know it, there are rules and regulations and laws, and they are discussing which State they should seek to become part of. As soon as you have people living in proximity to each other, you need some kind of organization to define and enforce the duties we each have towards everyone else.

The astonishing claim has been made by people at the extreme right of the political scale, that there is no such thing as society; only freely acting individuals. Would they claim that there is no such thing as a team, only individual players? No congregation, no association, no assembly or crowd? Of course these things exist separate and distinct from the individuals who make up each of them. One might as well say there is no such thing as a liver; only an aggregation of freely acting liver cells. Each of these aggregations has a nature and behavior in and of itself, regardless of the individuals that comprise it. Of course the particulars of the individuals will affect the nature and behavior of the group, but each individual has two distinct roles: one role is as an independent individual with individual needs and desires, the other is as a member of the group, desiring the welfare and continued existence of the group, which may well dictate behavior that is different from what one would do acting purely as an individual In other words a member of a group may well sacrifice some portion of his own best interest for the sake of the group.

So to say, as Ronald Reagan said, that Government is not the solution but rather the problem, is clearly nonsense. We have to have government. The question is what kind of government? This is the subject of an ongoing sociopolitical discourse that has been written about since the invention of writing, and was undoubtedly hotly debated before that. The majority of this debate has been purely theoretical. The true deciding factor that determined the kinds of government we had was the power to make it so. What that has meant through the ages is the rule of the strongest. The particular ways that this system has been arranged, and the rationales offered for it hardly matter. Sometimes a single figure such as a king or emperor is the titular head, but always the power has been wielded by a small number of people, and that power has been enforced ultimately at the point of a gun. Even in today’s democracies we are scarcely better off. We are still subject to rule by the strongest; only the nature of that strength has changed. Before the Industrial Revolution power derived from the control of land. In today’s world money is the instrument of power.

What is Science?

Science is not a profession, it is a method, an algorithm. An orderly set of instructions which when correctly applied yield the best possible approximation to a reliable and repeatable truth. It will also yield the degree of certitude of that truth as well as the degree of likely variance.

Science does not answer the question “What course should we take?” Science answers the question “If we take thus and such a course, what is the range of possible outcomes, and what is the probability of any given outcome?” There are many areas that science has no tools to tackle, which means that it is not the right method of approaching that problem. This is not a weakness of science any more than it is a weakness of a hammer that it cannot cut a straight line.

The process goes something like this. You have a flash of inspiration. You figure out ways of testing it by trying to disprove it. You try to eliminate all the other possible causes that could account for your results. You try it under as many different conditions as you can think of.

Only when you have thoroughly tested the limits of your hypothesis can you justify any confidence in it. Then comes the real test. In order to pass scientific muster you must show how you arrived at your conclusion in sufficient detail to allow others to replicate your findings. If a significant proportion of them succeed in doing so, then and only then can you claim to have arrived at a verifiable truth.

You can be an inventor without being a scientist; as long as what you invent works well enough to be beneficial in the world you can even get rich that way. You can make scientific discoveries with out being a scientist, but someone will have to do the science to prove it, it does not have to be the discoverer. The vast majority of scientists never discover anything new or propose an original hypothesis, they dedicate their lives to testing the ideas of others. Sometimes they are motivated by the desire to find mistakes in accepted hypotheses. No matter, they are all valuable to the project of Science itself, which is the search for ever more reliable truth.

Pure science barely exists in the world today. So much is known about the nature of the physical world at such a deep level, that advancing the frontiers of knowledge involves prolonged immersion on the subject even to understand the remaining problems, and then very expensive gadgets like CERN to test their theories. The days of hobbyist scientists discovering new materials are long gone, and such research is now done by corporations for their own use and profit. They are not specifically interested in advancing knowledge, but in making money. If they can make more money by suppressing knowledge, they will happily do so.

Science has among its practitioners a certain number of liars, a certain number of fools, honestly deluded people and some outright criminals. This statement could be said equally truthfully of lawyers, bankers, mechanics, wealthy people and pretty much anyone else. These are categories that people in general fall into in similar proportions throughout the population regardless of what station in life they occupy. The vast majority of people are honest and well intentioned. There is absolutely no reason to suppose that scientists have a greater propensity for dishonesty than the general public.

How do we know what we know?

Every decision is taken in the context of countless conditions. The number of possible reverberations that might result from any significant life decision is infinite, and the possibilities usually range from total success to utter failure. When you also count in the potential effects on others, and their probable reactions, trying to figure it all out logically is an impossibility and often leads to complete inability to make any decision at all. There are two possible kinds of response to this situation. Some declare that you just can never think it through and must rely on some kind of intuition or “direct knowing” or some such. This is just giving up, and the likelihood of making anything close to the optimal decision is no greater than plain chance. This is not much of a problem in the personal sphere where your actions will affect only a limited number of people, but in the public sphere it just is not good enough. If we are to make laws that everyone must obey and decisions that will affect everyone (and to live in a society we must do that) we owe it to them to base those laws and decisions on the most reliable basis possible.

This raises one of the most fundamental philosophical questions: “How do we know what we know?” The reason this question is so important is because the only way we can justify society’s abridgment of citizens’ freedom is if we can be morally certain that there is a strong and valid reason for it. There is no such thing as absolute certainty about anything, but in order to balance a societal need against the citizen’s freedom of action we need to know at the very least four things: what is the degree of harm being avoided; what is the severity of the restriction on freedom; what is the likelihood of the harm occurring; and how certain are we that the danger is real?

There are countless examples in history of measures being taken to counter a perceived danger that turned out in the end never to have been a danger at all. The Cold War was largely based on a gross overestimation of the capabilities and hostile intent of the USSR. 9/11 precipitated a series of government actions the echoes and aftershocks of which are still roiling the world (and inconveniencing the traveler) in 2017, which have cost us untold lives and treasure, and virtually none of them, I would be willing to bet, had any effect whatever upon the likelihood of another such event. So clearly it is vitally important to know what degree of credibility to give to any given piece of information.

We must recognize just how difficult it is to be certain of something. Things which seem self-evidently true turn out to be completely false. Things that seem quite obviously to be caused by a particular circumstance turn out to be caused by something quite different. We give great weight to our own personal experience, and the experiences of our friends and acquaintances, forgetting that we and they may very well not be typical of the world at large.

Fortunately this problem is not new. People have been thinking about it for centuries, and have come up with various solutions. Religion, in all of its varieties, is one solution. God will tell us what is right and what is wrong, and it is not up to us mere mortals to inquire into such matters. The difficulty with this solution is that there is by definition no way to verify the truth of what God says. You just have to have faith that it is true. Unfortunately we cannot even verify convincingly that such a concept as God even exists, and still less can we be certain that any alleged communication fro that source is even genuine, to say nothing of the impossibility of verifying its correct meaning. If your personal experience runs counter to what God says in any aspect at all, the whole edifice is then suspect, and you are left with no certainty.

Then there is folk knowledge, also known as old wives tales. Here we are on much more solid ground, as these remedies do represent accumulated experience and often study. The difficulty here is again the issue of verification. Too often old ideas persist long past the time when the original impulse for them is forgotten.

We might have direct personal experience of the matter, or perhaps have access to the combined experiences of others. Unfortunately this may be a poor basis upon which to draw a reliable conclusion. There may be something untypical about you and your acquaintances that make your experience quite different from that of others.

We may have a very strong intuitive flash that something is true. It just seems so right, answers so many questions, it just has to be true, right? Well, maybe. Certainly it could be true; many famous scientific discoveries came about through just such flashes of inspiration. But we do not hear the countless stories of the flashes of inspiration that turned out to be just plain wrong. The intuitive inspiration is just the start of the process. The real work is in testing the hypothesis to verify that it is in fact correct. Or more accurately to assess its degree of certitude.

Fortunately we have at our disposal the best tool ever invented by the mind of man for this purpose, and that tool is Science.

Change

Before the Industrial Revolution most of the property in the world was owned by absolute monarchs, and parceled out to others at their whim, to be taken back equally whimsically. Over a period of 250 years or so, this entire system disappeared, as a result of the Industrial Revolution, to be replaced by the one we know. Clearly there is nothing about the rights of property that are bound by nature. They can be redefined at will.

The capitalist economic system operates as a positive feedback loop. The more resources you have the easier it is to get more. This describes a runaway effect: nuclear fission is an example of a positive feedback loop. A thermostat, on the other hand, operates as a negative feedback loop, and has the effect of putting a natural limit on the phenomenon in question. Those born to wealth will in their time tend acquire even more wealth, while those at the bottom will tend to have less and less. The odds are astronomically high that any particular person born in the world at any given moment will find themselves at or near the very bottom. This fact in itself makes me very skeptical of the “we chose our position in life in order to learn certain lessons” school of thought. Why would so many agree to such a miserable existence?

It is not as if we could simply opt out. All of the livable space in the world is controlled, and access to it requires paying rent. We do not have the basic right of every wild animal, the right to exist unmolested on the planet, making our own way. There is nowhere in the world that you can do that, even if you could afford to go to such a place. We are born in a specific country, a completely artificial construct, yet one which, second only to our parentage, will largely determine our fate. We cannot simply choose to belong to a different country, except by dint of monumental effort we are tied to one place, one political entity. That political entity has life and death power over you. It can order you to fight to the death on its behalf. It can take away your freedom of movement and action for the rest of your life, or even take away your life itself if it so chooses.

Perhaps the most important feature of our societal system is that we believe that it is the best way of life ever invented, and everyone in the world should live that way. The idea of opting out is thought of as aberrant. The only way forward is more and better civilization. All other choices are unthinkable.

Yet all of it is a human construct. Nothing about the way society operates is dictated by any natural law. Gravity and friction are examples of natural law. We are bound by their effects no matter how much we may deny their existence. Countries and civilizations and economies are artificial constructs made up by people, and their rules were made up by people, and could just as well be completely different. Countless varieties of society have existed throughout history. All of these things that absolutely govern our lives are constructs that we collectively agree to. They are constructs that can change, will change, indeed are changing right now.

Imprisonment

We say “serving prison time,” which I believe is a phrase that enables us to avoid confronting the truth of what we are doing to our prisoners. I have come to believe that the idea of imprisonment as a routine punishment for all manner of transgressions against the community is a moral outrage. Next to our life itself, our freedom of action and movement is the most precious thing we have, and indeed some would say that without it life itself is worth very little. Yet we debate between locking people away for ten years or fifteen as though there were little to choose between them. We speak blithely of locking people away for the rest of their lives, with not even the remotest conception of what we are condemning them to.

It is not simply the deprivation of freedom, though that is in my mind enough alone to condemn the practice, it is also the conditions under which prisoners are kept. They are put almost entirely at the mercy of prison staff, who are hired largely for their “tough” qualities. A kindly, empathetic prison guard will not last long at the job. We have seen from well-known experiments the effect on people of giving them power over others, even in academic laboratory settings. Imagine how bad it can get in real life situations in such places as maximum security prisons. The truth is truly horrific.

The social purposes supposedly being served by this system are said to be fourfold: rehabilitation, segregation, deterrence and punishment. Cure them of their criminality, put them where they cannot do further harm, and apply sanctions for their criminal behavior that provide serious consequences and by their harshness discourage others from doing similar things.

Rehabilitation is so little practiced in our prison systems that one might say that the exact reverse is taking place. There may be, it is true, places in the US where genuinely “enlightened” prison methods are being used, though the expression itself seems to me to be an oxymoron, but if so they are very much in the minority. The rest of the system can fairly be described as schools for crime. Universities, in fact. Prisons turn a large proportion of their inmates into lifetime criminals.

Locking criminals away does indeed prevent them from committing further crimes while they are locked away, but at very great cost. The main problem is that at some point most of them will end up being released. After perhaps decades of harsh inhumane treatment they are turned loose with only whatever possessions they had with them when arrested, and a few dollars. Is it any wonder that they have difficulties readjusting to outside life, or that many of them end up back inside within a short time, sometimes preferring that life to the challenges of freedom. The only thing they know is the criminal life, and the only people they know are criminals.

Deterrence hinges on the idea that people will avoid crime for fear of the punishment. Increasingly harsh sentences are imposed, often cemented in place by minimum sentencing laws, in pursuit of this aim. Psychological studies, however, seem to show that this is not effective. The likelihood of being caught seems to weigh much more heavily than the fear of punishment; criminals do not expect to be caught, so the severity of the punishment is immaterial to them. Furthermore such considerations do not even come into play when it comes to crimes committed in the heat of the moment, without forethought. They are also of little weight when the crime is truly one of need.

So we are left with punishment. The criminal did a bad thing, and must suffer as a consequence. This (in the absence of the other three) is perhaps the least defensible rationale. If this is indeed the only remaining justification, then the degree of punishment must bear a direct relationship with the harm done by the crime. I would argue that this is almost never the case. Instead prosecutors brag about the number of criminals they have caused to be imprisoned and for how long. Far from carefully suiting the punishment to the crime (which would require individual examination of the circumstances of each case, and of the circumstances of the criminal) punishment is decided in most cases by a bargaining process between prosecutor and the defense counsel. The vast majority of criminal cases are decided by plea bargaining; not only is the defendant effectively denied the benefit of a jury trial, even the judge plays almost no part except rubber stamping the result.

This is done by charging the defendant with the most serious crimes that the circumstances of the case could possibly justify. The prosecutor does not imagine that he could obtain a conviction from a jury on these charges, that is not the aim. The aim is to frighten the defendant into pleading to a lesser charge that he may not even be guilty of so as not to have to run the risk (however remote) of a conviction on the harsher charges. Ironically in this situation draconian minimum sentences do act as a strong incentive, an incentive to accept a manifestly unjust punishment in order to avoid the risk of an even worse result.

There are many facets to this issue which is the great shame and crime of our society. There is the disgrace of private prisons run for profit. It outrages me that anyone should even require reasons for condemning private prisons; are they not morally unacceptable simply on the face of it? Take all of the evils I have already described, add to them the incentive to operate the entire concern as cheaply as possible and remove even the pretence of accountability imposed by a publicly run system? What could possibly go wrong?

There are the various industries that prey on the prisoners and their families. The private phone companies that charge unconscionable rates for calls. The prison run banking system that charges hefty fees for depositing money into prisoners’ accounts. The prison labor racket where prisoners are paid pennies per hour for work that is sold for regular prices, with most of the profit going to private contractors.

All these circumstances, and many more that I do not have space for here, combine to make prisoners’ lives almost insupportable. And all of it is on top of what is already the most severe deprivation short of death, the deprivation of freedom. Even if you hold that we should lock people away, is it even good policy to make the conditions so severe? Would we not be better served by a system that really did rehabilitate people? Regardless of whether you think that this is a morally correct thing to do, surely it would be the sensible thing to do.