A Few Brief, Not Terribly Original Thoughts on Certainty and Politics

"Particles are things, complete in themselves. Waves are disturbances in something else. We must choose one of the two ways of seeing, but as soon as we do we can’t know everything about them." - Bohr, Copenhagen

Slowly but surely I am plodding through a biography of arch-capitalist Andrew Mellon while also rapidly devouring David McCullough's The Johnstown Flood. Mellon had a small stake in the resort that was built on the shores of Lake Conemaugh, though he had no part in the construction of the dam by which the lake was created and was nowhere near the place when the earthen dam gave way and killed more than 2000 people. I haven't yet gotten far enough into either book to learn what Mellon's reaction to the news was, but if it was anything like his reactions to most events in his life, it was cold, calculating and driven almost entirely by self-regard.

Mellon was Secretary of the Treasury under Presidents Harding, Coolidge and Hoover. These three administrations remain the exemplars of laissez-faire policy and market-run national economic policy. When the Great Depression was at its height, Mellon gave Hoover advice both sound in theory and brutal in its cruelty: liquidate everything - the farmers, the soup kitchens, the navy, the stocks, maybe even the treasury itself.

Andrew and Kyle occasionally take part in online debates where their foes take positions very nearly as extreme as Secretary Mellon's. Do away with the minimum wage. It'll help small businesses. Do away with employer-based health coverage. It'll help small businesses. Do away with public schools. It'll lower property taxes. Privatize the police force. It'll lower property taxes. The people who take these positions always acknowledge that there will be a period of adjustment while the market figures out how to keep people from starving while working for less than the minimum wage, but that the waves of supply and demand will always fall into sync when left to their own devices. To borrow from the words that Michael Frayn put into Niels Bohr's mouth, I'd hate to be one of the particles that gets left behind or smashed by those waves.

What do we owe one another? Most of us conduct our everyday affairs with very little support from others. We sell our labor to the highest bidder that meets certain requirements of ethics and/or convenience. We pay our own way, using the remuneration that we receive from our workplace in order to acquire food, shelter and clothing. We are fair and polite in our interactions with strangers and obey the principle of the Golden Rule. Given that, why should we expect our society to be extra compassionate, to extend greater help than we would ask of others in our regular lives? To put it in the parlance that I see in the online debates, 'why should my tax money go to some welfare crackhead?'

This is not a snide, idle or irrelevant question. It cuts straight to the heart of the liberal/conservative divide. The liberal view of the world takes place from within the wave. It looks at how the connected particles are all moving together and attempts to strengthen the bonds between the particles so that the wave can move quickly without losing strength. The conservative point of view is that of the particle. It is whole in and of itself and sees the other particles as independent (though their movement is suspiciously uniform and wavelike), free and responsible. Both views are correct but incomplete. However, when applied to human beings and nations rather than particles and waveforms, only the liberal point of view makes allowance for this incompleteness, this uncertainty.

Because what if it's possible that a crackhead gets clean with a little assistance from the state? Isn't that preferable to her not getting clean without assistance? Suppose she doesn't get clean but continues to draw a welfare check and use it to keep herself in cocaine, baking powder and cheap plastic lighters - is that not preferable to her engaging in violence in order to feed her addiction?

Rick 'Ultimate Justice' Perry provides the best example of the individualist political view and its potential failings when taken to absolutes. Perry's assertion that every person executed by the state of Texas was deserving of death by lethal injection is ludicrous. If we allow that every single person on death row was guilty of the crime for which they were convicted, we still run into questions of what deserve means. Up until the early part of the last decade, Texas still had both people who were minors at the time of their crime and mentally retarded inmates awaiting execution. The Supreme Court of the United States had to clarify that it was both cruel and unusual to kill men with IQs of 70 who were 16 when they took part in a robbery that went wrong. Also worth taking into account is the fact that we should not allow that every single person on death row in Texas is guilty, given the state's horrid record appointing competent defense attorneys and abhominable reliance on psychiatric evaluators who diagnose defendants as sociopaths without ever fucking interviewing them.

In the photo above, you can see a large, misty white area at far left, where Lake Mead is overflowing the Hoover Dam. You can also see the large gray mass of the dam holding most of the dark blue water in place. The large misty area is the spillway, where excess water can drain without running over the top of the dam. The dam at Lake Conemaugh that spectacularly failed and wiped out the city of Johnstown, Pennsylvania way back in 1889 had an inadequate spillway that was never addressed because the men who owned it were certain that adequate precautions had been taken. They even rejected an engineer's warning that the dam would fail in event of even a large flood because the engineer had misspelled the name of the lake (and the repairs he suggested were costly). Credit where credit is due, the Hoover Dam was designed and authorized during the Harding and Hoover administrations, respectively. Perhaps Andrew Mellon had learned to see waves in addition to particles, but I doubt it. He was, after all, Treasury Secretary, so to him the Hoover Dam was just an expenditure on a balance sheet, just like crackheads are not human beings but wastes of tax allocation or death row prisoners are all monsters.

Questions and doubt are not always antithetical to action; sometimes they lead to safety, empathy, justice.