Is C-SPAN Coverage of Congress Really a Good Idea?

I used to think that C-SPAN,  which televises the House and Senate,  congressional hearings, and the like,  was an unmitigated blessing.  

Lately,  though,  I have had second thoughts.  C-SPAN has many wonderful programs (Book TV,  the series on first ladies, etc.).  But its coverage of Congress is causing fundamental damage to the ability of Congress to do its job.

C-SPAN televises sessions of  House and Senate in which only a handful of the members  are present.  Speeches are addressed,  not to the other members of Congress, who are not present,  but to the TV audience.  This makes sense for members who love free publicity  but takes time which speakers might have used consulting with other members of their houses,  with staff, or with constituents. 

C-SPAN sometimes covers hearings in which only committee members of one  party are present.  These hearings are orchestrated to score points with the public for one side of an issue or the other.  They don’t contribute to serious negotiations among committee members about  what needs to be done.
Since all public policies have both advantages and disadvantages,  simplistic analysis assuming that some proposals are all benefits and no costs or all costs and no benefits must be avoided.  Yet that is exactly what many of the speeches and hearings telecast by C-SPAN provide us with.

I think that C-SPAN should stop televising sessions of the Senate and House except on the rare occasions when quorums are present and serious business is being done.  It should stop covering committee hearings in which both parties are not represented and in which there is no serious discussion of both the pros and cons of proposed legislation.  This would give it time to broadcast more of its other programming,  which is often more substantive,  and it would help push Congress back towards the functionality it has lost in recent decades.

Such a pullback by C-SPAN  would have some costs for democracy,  which requires an informed electorate.  But remember,  all policies have both costs and benefits.  The benefit here would be a Congress that is more functional and whose members spend their time interacting more productively.  This would be a good tradeoff.

It has long been understood that serious negotiations must be conducted in private,  so that negotiators are not trapped into hardened initial positions by fear of losing face or being accused of inconsistency.  The Constitutional Convention of 1787 was not open to press or public,  though the results of that Convention were of course made public when the proposed Constitution was sent out for ratification.  President Woodrow Wilson famously called in international relations for “open covenants,  openly arrived at.”  But  experience teaches that diplomatic negotiations are more fruitful when conducted in secret, so that we get “open covenants,  secretly arrived at.”   

If members of Congress want to continue giving speeches to empty chambers in order to get something printed in the Congressional Record,  which they have long done,  let them do so.  But don’t give them additional incentives for such behavior by putting them on live TV.  The time has come to help Congress resume its traditional functionality by treating its members to a healthy dose of benign neglect by C-SPAN. 

Mountains and Molehills: Why Data Mining Makes Sense

Mountains and Molehills:  Why Data Mining Makes Sense

Twice in the last ten years our credit card company asked if we had made purchases flagged by their software as deviations from our usual patterns.  Both times they were right; we had made no such transactions. Visa  promptly gave us a new account number. I was delighted with their data-mining , even though it "snooped" on my transaction patterns. What skin off my teeth was that "invasion of privacy"?

After 9-11 the F.B.I.,  which had noticed some of the unusual activity by the people planning the attack,  was criticized for failing to “connect the dots.”   If those dots had been connected federal authorities might have seen the pattern suggested by the connections and headed off the 9-11 disaster.  Critics of the recently revealed data-mining operations forget  that it is impossible to connect dots that have not been collected in the first place. 

In the present case the dots are individual calls from one telephone number to another.   Federal agencies have been collecting records of all these calls.  Responding to this,  the New York Times recently editorialized that Congress should enact  “legislation to limit the collection of call records and the monitoring of Internet traffic to that of people suspected of terrorism, ending the mass warehousing of everyone’s data.”     

This editorial misses the whole concept of data mining,  in which computers scan immense amounts of data (like which phone number phones which phone number, when, and for how long) and pick up patterns which suggest activity  meriting further investigation. Limiting collection of this information to calls associated with people already under suspicion would make it much less likely to detect people who are not under suspicion but ought to be.

Remember that the data about phone calls being swept up by government agencies does not include what people are saying in those calls.  After patterns have been detected,  authorities may place wiretaps on specific people,  but only after getting specific authorization by a court.  

Of course this data mining harms would-be terrorists,  but aside from that what harm does the so-called invasion of people’s privacy cause anybody?  What difference does it make in our lives?

“Big data” is a recent phenomenon made possible by modern computers,  which can scan immense amounts of information and detect patterns which could never be found by finite human investigators. Data mining techniques are already being used by astronomers,  traffic control people,  medical researchers, and in many other fields.  They are improving our ability to understand the universe,   make traffic flow more smoothly, and treat diseases.  There is no reason why we should not also exploit this technology
to improve the security of our people. 

The private groups which have declared war against the United States do not hesitate to use modern technology (cell phones,  the internet, explosives, etc.) to further their plans.  There is no sense in placing artificial limits on our own ability to use technology to limit the damage they can do.

In older wars people were conscripted, shipped off to fight, placed under wage controls, taxed more, and endured rationing. Surely the minimal "invasions of privacy"  caused by the programs recently revealed pale in comparison.

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This piece has run in the Oregonian and the (Adrian, Michigan) Daily Telegram.

Edward Snowden: A different possible interpretation of his actions

This piece models how the same facts can be interpreted in very different ways, and is also something of a parody of conspiracy theory but with the twist that the hypothetical conspiracy (which is admittedly unlikely) is by the good guys and for a legitimate purpose. 

Edward Snowden:   A  different possible interpretation of his actions

Decades ago I read a novel,  Typewriter in the Sky,  by L. Ron Hubbard (who later founded “Dianetics”).  I remember this scifi novel only dimly—and won’t read it again to refresh my memory. Reading it once was bad enough!  But the general idea was that its protagonist falls into a  universe recognizably created by a work of fiction being written by a friend who is a very bad novelist.  Our hero—who can hear a typewriter clacking away up in the sky---is horrified, since he knows how his friend’s mind works and realizes he is in for a terrible fate.

I recalled this novel recently while thinking about the Snowden affair.  It seems to me that the Snowden story looks like a very bad novel..  

Why, for example,  would American authorities make such a fuss about Edward Snowden’s revelations?  The NSA data-mining of connections between phone numbers, after all,  is just taking common sense advantage of opportunities presented by modern computers.  Since the mining does not capture the contents of the communications flowing through the telephone networks,  it does not violate anybody’s privacy in those communications.

Why did Chinese authorities with influence in Hong Kong allow someone supposedly wanted by China’s leading trade partner and implicit ally to fly off to Moscow, and why are Russian authorities being so cagey about Snowden?   

To make sense of the Snowden affair might be easier if we look at it from a very different angle.  No doubt this interpretation is improbable,  but even its bare possibility is worth thinking about:  what if Snowden is loyally playing the leading role in a scenario staged to bag a large number of would-be terrorists?

In this scenario,  Snowden made his revelations about NSA data mining,  not in defiance of our government,  but at its behest.  In this scenario his flight to Hong Kong and then to Moscow and seeking political asylum are merely a magnificent publicity stunt.  The goal of the stunt would be draw attention to his revelations and thereby scare terrorists into changing how they communicate.  Such changes,  which NSA computers could spot,  might identify plotters who otherwise could have  avoided detection.   

At the very least this plot might frighten some terrorists into using less efficient methods of communicating with each other, a goal worthwhile in itself.    

If Snowden’s “leaks” were actually part of an official operation,  we would want to commend him if the true story can ever be told.  So perhaps we should avoid rushing to judgment about him.

It would be interesting to know how China and Russia would fit into this scenario.  Are they in the dark about Snowden,  or are they knowingly playing their own part in the operation?  After all,  Russia and China have legitimate concerns about terrorism and could have good reasons to cooperate with us.

Of course such a plot would be a massive deception,  but deception in policy matters is not always bad.  The successful landings in Normandy on D-Day,  for example,  were helped by elaborate (and successful) efforts to bamboozle the Nazis into thinking the attack was going to be elsewhere. 

Readers may wonder if publishing speculation about a plot might sabotage the plot, if one actually exists.  But by now any terrorist changes in communication patterns stimulated by Snowden’s revelations—whether or not there was a plot--- will already have happened and the NSA computers will have safely recorded all the dots that need to be connected.  

Plot or no plot,  I wish them luck in connecting those dots.

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This piece has run in the Oregonian and the (Adrian, Michigan) Daily Telegram.

Advice to a theological windbag who didn't know when to quit

Cleaning out my files,  I recently ran into a commentary I wrote after suffering through an extremely long-winded sermon at a Homecoming chapel service back in the mid-1970s.  (The service should have concluded at 12 but didn't get out until 12:20.) It can be sung to the tune of the hymn,  O God Our Help In Ages Past:

I do not for one moment doubt
that you have much to say;
but next time you can count me out,
I do not have all day.

"They also serve,"  it has been said,
"who only sit and wait."
But those who sit until they're dead,
may start to serve too late.

You need not show us all your stuff,
you need not numb our brains;
eternity is not enough,
time finite still remains!

Welcome to the Dark Ages

I have been cleaning out my files and recently ran into a sermon I delivered to the Adrian College chapel service over 40 years ago.  For some reason they never invited me to do another one! Here it is, for whatever it might be worth.

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Welcome to the Dark Ages

(A chapel address delivered at Adrian College by Paul F. deLespinasse on October 25, 1972.)

Did you ever wonder what life was like in the Dark Ages? Our ability to imagine Eighth and Ninth Century conditions is probably rather limited.  But according to William G. Pollard we need not therefore resign ourselves to ignorance;  like the Michigander seeking a pleasant peninsula,  we need merely look around us.  Professor Pollard,  who is a physicist,  persuasively argues that we ourselves are living in a Dark Age,  a Second

Dark Age.

Pollard defines a dark age as any “period in which the West has lost the capacity to respond to either one of its two cultural roots.”  These two roots are known as the Greek-Roman tradition and the Judeo-Christian tradition.  The First Dark Age was a result of losing hold of the Greek-Roman tradition.  The Second Dark Age, in which we presently live, resulted from our collective loss of feeling for the Judeo-Christian way of thinking.  The First Dark Age was dominated by the Church,  the institutional embodiment of the Judeo-Christian tradition,  and ended when the Renaissance brought a renewed feeling for Greek and Roman ideas,  restoring the balance.

The present Dark Age, conversely,  is dominated by the Greek-Roman outlook and characterized by a general religious feebleness.  Harvey Cox, of the Harvard Divinity School,  accurately calls ours the age of the “secular city.”  As Edward Shils rather vividly put it:

            Having, with the aid of Deweyan naturalism,  “demythologization.” and

            existentialism, disposed of their deity or at least placed him in a weak

            position,  Protestant clergymen in the United States have been suffering

            from the intellectual equivalent of technological unemployment.

But it is not just—or even mainly—the clergymen. It is the whole climate of the times.  As Pollard points out:

            A college student of today who is introduced for the first time to

            Thucydides or Plato,  to Cicero or Virgil,  finds himself rather much at

            home in the ideas and outlooks which he encounters. He recognizes

            important differences,  to be sure,  but there is in them,  nevertheless, very

            little which seems so alien that he cannot respond sympathetically from his

            own experience to the outlooks on life and history which he discovers there.

            The same student,  on the other hand, even though formally associated with

            Christianity or Judaism and regarded himself as a committed and practicing

            member of a church or synagogue,  nevertheless finds himself in alien

            territory when he comes to Biblical literature.

For Harvey Cox,  in spite of the secular city,  there is no present Dark Age;  he believes that the secular city is unequivocally good, and indeed that it is the fulfillment of the law and the prophets.  If Cox is right,  even if we want to define a Dark Age so that the present era qualifies as one,  the description implies no negative connotation.  “The name is not the thing,”  and if the thing is good it is not rendered otherwise by having a frightening label stuck on it.  It is difficult, however,  for me not to agree with Pollard when he says that:

            underneath all our material prosperity and accomplishments there is a deep-

            seated malaise, a sense of meaninglessness and frustration, and a background

            of dark and foreboding suspicions about the feasibility of modern man’s

            whole enterprise which have been widely noted in much recent commentary.

Pollard,  incidentally,  was writing in 1964—during the pre-Vietnam era of relatively good feelings and liberal euphoria—and not just reflecting the more recent fashionable secular gloominess.  If the malaise he notes has really been lurking under the surface all along,  then Cox’s complacency is not called for.

Pollard’s prescription calls for a second renaissance in which people would redevelop their feeing for the Biblical style of thought so that balance between the two roots of our culture would once more be restored.  But how feasible is such a renaissance?  What would it require?

The very minimum condition for a religious renaissance---it seems to me---would be a renewal of our ability to take seriously the Biblical thesis that God creates men in his own image and is interested in each individual human being.  This thesis has come into apparent conflict in our time with the sociological idea that men have created God in their own image, and with the common sense feeling---grounded in our own hectic lives--that God could not possibly have time to be personally concerned with each of the four billion individuals presently on earth.  For those who realize that there may well be sentient beings on millions of other planets in this universe,  the problem only seems to be compounded.

The trouble with the sociological theory that men create God in their own imagine is not that it is completely false.  As Rupert Brooke suggests in his poem about how a fish  might conceive of heaven,  it is natural for us to extrapolate qualities we see in ourselves to God:

                        …somewhere,  beyond Space and Time,

                        Is wetter water,  slimier slime.

                        And there (they trust) there swimmeth One

                        Who swam ere rivers were begun,

                        Immense,  of fishy form and mind,

                        Squamous, omnipotent and kind;

                        And under that Almighty Fin,

                        The littlest fish may enter in.

The trouble when we say men create God is that we are referring to creating a concept of God,  whereas when we say God creates men we mean He creates the objects themselves and not just the concept.  Two different things, which have little bearing on the validity of each other,  are thus being talked about.  In the parable of the Blind Men and the Elephant,  the fact that the Blind Men were creating various partial and hence inevitably erroneous concepts of the elephant around which they were groping had no implications for the existence or nature of the elephant itself.  I do not see how the situation would have been appreciably changed if it had been blind but intelligent baby elephants groping around their mother.

A more serious obstacle to a religious renaissance is the difficulty in believing that God has enough time to be personally concerned with each individual person.  Modern social conditions have made it increasingly hard to take the Biblical thesis on this question seriously and literally.  It has become commonplace to observe that ours is the age of large-scale organization,  impersonality, and facelessness.  The inhabitants of the secular city,  as Cox correctly says,  cannot know everybody and cannot have deep personal dealings with everybody.  Just for one person to shake hands with every person in the United States would take a lifetime, and shaking hands is an extremely superficial transaction at best.  A certain degree of anonymity in large scale human interactions is therefore inevitable.

The theological danger in all this is that we may be tempted to take our new appreciation or even obsession with a facelessness, impersonality, and anonymity which are direct and logical results of the finite amount of time each individual human being has,  and extrapolate this human characteristic to God.  Cox,  I think,  falls into this trap when he says “we need to develop a viable theology of anonymity.” 

Fortunately,  men are more imaginative and more able to transcend themselves in their thinking than the Blind Baby Elephants or Brooke’s Fish were.  Not only can we project essential human characteristics into our concept of God, but we can also extrapolate obvious differences.  One such obvious difference has to do with time: the relationship between men and time, on the one hand,  and on the other hand the relation between God and time.  The basic point that I would like to make today is that in a created universe time is a part of the created order,  and therefore must be transcended by God.  It seems to me that there is no escaping this conclusion if any sense at all is to be made of Judeo-Christian theology and the Bible is not to be dismissed as a fabrication with no basis in reality whatsoever.

The point that time is part of the created order is not new;  St. Augustine said it a long time ago (though I admit that my own appreciation of it derives not from the study of St. Augustine,  but from the works of Dewey Larson.)  But an idea need not be new in order to be true,  and I think that it speaks in a particularly direct way to the obstacles human experience in our time has placed in the path of taking the Biblical thesis literally.  If God is the creator (among other things) of time, it logically follows that time can be no limit on the activity or attention of God.  When the Bible claims that not one sparrow shall fall on the ground “without your Father” (Matthew 10:29),  a claim which sounds absurd to the busy modern ear---I might almost say to the Greek-Roman ear!--- there is therefore no reason why we cannot take the statement literally.  Indeed,  until many more people can take this statement literally,  I believe we must wait in vain for the religious renaissance.

Is time a key to the intellectual and emotional logjam of our age?  Perhaps time will tell. Meanwhile,  let me welcome you to the Dark Ages with a concluding observation:  we must remember that a Dark Age is only a collective phenomenon which can be surmounted by individuals, and that it is better to light a candle than to curse the darkness.

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William G.  Pollard,  “Dark Age and Renaissance in the Twentieth Century,” in Edmund Fuller (Ed),  The Christian Idea of Education (New Haven:  Yale U. Press, 1964).

Edward Shils,  “Intellectuals and the Center of Society,”  The University of Chicago Magazine, July/August 1972,  p. 5.

Brooke’s poem was quoted in Herbert Butterfield,  Christianity and History (New York:  Scribners, 1949), p. 118.

Harvey Cox,  The Secular City (New York:  Macmillan, 1965), p. 42.

Dewey B. Larson,  New Light on Space and Time (Portland: North Pacific Publishers, 1965).

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Paul F. deLespinasse is professor emeritus of political science at Adrian College, but now lives in Corvallis, Oregon.  He can be reached through his website, http://www.deLespinasse.org . 

Anti-discrimination law: Time for an honest reappraisal

There has been much harrumphing about the Iowa Supreme Court’s recent decision in favor of a dentist who fired his long-time assistant because his lust for her threatened his marriage.  The commentaries thus far have been one-sided, but the case invites serious re-consideration of antidiscrimination laws in general.

Anybody who criticizes antidiscrimination legislation risks being branded as a racial bigot, since the first major examples of such legislation were the civil rights laws of the 1960s.  The obviously noble objective of this legislation inhibits criticism of the means by which that goal was pursued.  

The basic problem with making discrimination illegal is that genuine laws are stated in terms of actions.  Some actions are prohibited, and those which are not prohibited are perfectly legal.  But discrimination is not an action at all; it is just a possible reason for or motivation of an action. 

An employer’s decision not to hire a particular individual or to fire that person,  for example,  could be for any number of possible reasons,  only one of which might be that the employer is prejudiced against some class of people of which that individual is a member.  Since the very same action may be legal or illegal depending on the motive,  the government (meaning prosecutors,  judges,  etc.) must decide whether the action was taken for good reasons or bad reasons. 

Such decisions take time.  In the case of the fired dental assistant in Iowa, it took three years for the case to get up to the state supreme court.

In other words,  antidiscrimination law means that a large number of private decisions are no longer final until a protracted and expensive process of litigation has taken place. Actions can be observed,   but motivations must be inferred.  This means that government officials must make highly subjective inferential decisions about the motivations for which actions took place. Ironically,  laws whose goal is to prevent arbitrary treatment by private persons radically increase the ability of powerful government officials to treat people arbitrarily.

Whether the horrible treatment of black people in America justified such an extreme remedy as antidiscrimination “law” is beyond the scope of the present discussion.  However there can be no doubt that the civil rights laws  have been a precedent that has been expanded beyond all reasonable limits.  There are now all sorts of “discrimination” that have been made illegal.

In the Iowa case,  the fired assistant was admittedly a top-notch and experienced worker for whom her former employer would give excellent references.  She should have had little difficulty in finding a good job with another dentist,  in which case her financial losses from losing her previous job would have been minimal. 

I do hope her lawyer was working on a contingency fee basis, as otherwise she will be out a serious amount of money. 

Nobody has a kind word for the Iowa dentist, and neither do I.  But even bad people can have a good case, and the Iowa Supreme Court should be congratulated for not extending antidiscrimination law even further than required by current statutes.  It would be even better if legislatures would reconsider the propriety and wisdom of making an endless list of discriminations illegal in the first place. 

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This piece has run in the (Portland) Oregonian,  the Iowa City Press-Citizen, and the (Adrian, Michigan)  Daily Telegram.

Should we repeal the Second Amendment?

Recent mass shootings  have put gun control on the national discussion agenda again but have not improved the quality of that discussion.    Control enthusiasts propose laws which do nothing to decrease the number of guns already floating around the country.  Nor do they deal with situations where weapons legally acquired are stolen or accessed by criminals or the mentally ill.  

Control opponents note that proposed laws will do little to cut down on mass shootings,  but are even more adamantly opposed to stronger laws.  And some argue that an armed population is necessary to prevent the development of a tyrannical government.  If such a regime were to rise,  in these folks’ view,   people who have guns could rise up and overthrow it.

Even if Congress were to enact reasonable new restrictions,  there is a good chance that the courts would find that they violate the Second Amendment.   We therefore might need to consider repealing the Second Amendment. (There is precedent:  the unwise 18^th Amendment,  which outlawed alcoholic beverages, was repealed by the 21^st Amendment.) 

Before any such repeal, however,  we need to re-examine the idea that an armed population could protect liberty by violently overthrowing a tyrannical government. 

As a student of history,  I cringe when  anyone refers to revolution as a desirable thing.  For several decades at Adrian College I taught courses on the Soviet Union,  and students would sometimes ask if  the Communists could be overthrown by a revolution there.    I would answer that I certainly hoped not,  since the U.S.S.R. was just beginning to get over the horrible results produced by the revolutions back in 1917 when the Communists seized power. 

The problem with revolution is that it is fairly easy to destroy a bad government but very difficult to replace it with one that is better.  We are currently seeing the results of revolutions and wars that overthrew tyrannical regimes in the Middle East. It is no surprise to me that the new regimes are themselves either tyrannies or, even worse, anarchies in which armed groups within the population kill each other in large numbers. 

Philosophers have long understood the dangers of revolution.  Spinoza, for example, warned that “[I]t is … dangerous to remove a king, even though it is perfectly clear that he is a tyrant.  For a people accustomed to royal rule, and kept in check by that alone, will despise and make a mockery of any lesser authority; and so, if it removes one king, it will find it necessary to replace him by another, and he will be a tyrant not by choice but by necessity.”  

Even revolutionaries like Marx and Engels,  who claimed that workers “have nothing to lose but their chains,” had to admit that their vaunted “class struggle” historically “ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large,  or in the common ruin of the struggling classes.” (Emphasis added.)

Americans do not need guns in order to protect our liberties.   We have much better ways to protect ourselves.  Our Constitution provides for elections,  judicial review of laws enacted by Congress,  freedom of speech,  due process  and equal protection of law. The  best protection against tyranny is an educated and attentive public.   

The Constitution gives us many blessings, but we should not assume that it is perfect.  Our founders could not anticipate today’s weapons technologies.  It would be no disrespect for them if we repeal the Second Amendment, which  may be necessary if we are to have adequate control of guns.   

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This article has appeared in the (Adrian, Michigan) Daily Telegram.