Getting Serious
Today, I have something important to say. No, it's not about Jonathan's goats, or the digestive magic of corn, or about Harry Potter, blogging etiquette, or the coolness of President's Choice products.
Today, we get political.
It only makes sense, if you think about it. After all, Jon and I, we are scholars (I say "scholars" with an impeccable British accent, so I would advise you to start from the top and make it punchy when you get to the "scholars" part). I said this yesterday with reference to our fights (or rather, lack thereof). Bickering, quite frankly, is for the masses. We prefer to synthesize the underlying institutional structures, tease out the socio-political factors, and deconstruct conceptual paradigms, in order to articulate (and defend) our mutually exclusive positions.
And not only are Jonathan and I scholars, we are political scientists. My brother, Neil, thinks this is funny. He looks down on political scientists. I gave up defending them long ago. I am even more inclined to cut my losses now, given that I will very soon have 5 siblings knowledgeable in the engineering. And so, this just might be my finally opportunity to defend an area of study that I so dearly love. It's not political science, but it's close - it's policy.
First off, I would like to point out, that its not easy being a political scientist. Political scientists have to grapple every day with the fact that they have no idea what they study or how they are studying it. It's true - while economists have their traditional principles (individuals are self-interested, rational, utility-maximizers), and scientists have their methodology, political scientists are no less than a bunch of siblings squabbling with one another. Some like to pretend they are "scientists", others "economists", and even others "artists". The artist types scare me a bit. I don't know where I fit but I'd like to think I'm not playing their game.
But I do play their game; I can't help it. Lately, I've become obsessed with reading the comments the general public posts on the Globe and Mail website in response to specific articles. Some articles garner a whopping 200 comments. I read them. I can't help it - it's fascinating to consider the way normal, non-political science people must think. And quite frankly, it gets to me. Wimpy unrealistic, counter productive sugary naive Jack-Laytonesque comments irritate me. On the other hand, Conservative Christian remarks downright frighten me. And boy are they rampant on the Globe and Mail website.
Take this for example - A 25-year old man was executed in Singapore for drug trafficking. His mother wasn't even allowed to hug him before she watched her son die. Did the comments from the public ever flood in. A lot of them remarked "Good for Singapore - Given the lives destroyed by drug trafficking, the punishment was perhaps not harsh enough". My response? Fine, it's true - drug trafficking destroys lives. An earth-shattering amount of them. But so does AIDS, so does war, so does smoking, and pollution. And so does the growing disparity of income. Who is to blame for all these things? It's impossible to pin-point one individual. As for who is responsible for the deaths due to drugs, prudence, ethics, and pragmatics dictates that it doesn't begin and end with drug dealers.
The lives we all live and luxuries we enjoy are undeniably at the expense of the lives of others. Really. The $1,000 couch Jonathan and I bought in September could have fed and housed the cold and frail homeless man that lives down the street. It could buy anti-viral triple therapy for a child born with AIDS in Swaziland.
It could, but it didn't.
In response to Neil for the uselessness of my discipline, this is what I have to say: You study power - physical power - it's properties, medium, and results with particular embedded systems. I study power in a more difficult, but equally real sense. I study why women contract AIDS more than men; I study why AIDS interventions fail and what are the power structures that allow them to fail - like the denial of a problem by African politicians who believe that such 'Western diseases' won't spread in their countries, or the gender-bias policies that target condom use at women to control men even though women have little power in sexual relations, or the hazardous Christian-Right ideology that perpetuates the problem with abstinence-only approaches.
These are the things that get to me, and I must say, I am growing more and more concerned about the quickness of humanity to judge, to throw the very helpful "treat others as I'd want to be treated" maxism out the window. To some degree, we should all aspire to be good political scientists, to be pragmatic and prudent in what we would think about others.
Consider this actual case: a Canadian boy has been charged with throwing a grenade at an American soldier in Iraq. He is being held in the U.S. and could possibly face the death penalty. Canadians posted on the Globe and Mail article shouting "hooray for the U.S." and "hang him right away". Such haste in condemning a boy to death before even being convicted of the crime. These very individuals would be mortified if one day, they were picked up and convicted arbitrarily for something, while their fellow Canadians waved signs of condemnation and death against them for crimes they had yet to stand trial on.
Another case - a student of mine wrote a paper proposal. Her thesis was "Immigrants in Canada are ruining Canadian culture". To prove this, she said she would argue that minorities are given priority over Canadian in the work force and that immigrants aren't deported when they commit crimes. Again, what haste! First off, minorities aren't the same as immigrants. And second immigrants (who are citizens) aren't deported when they commit crimes because Canada is their country! They are Canadians in the very same sense that this young Caucasian woman was.
I'm not sure where I was going with this but I know it was somewhere very important. As much as political scientists infuriate me for being so vague and wishy washy in their analysis, it's the extreme views of the general public that concern me. As a society we love to blame, to punish, and condemn. We love to paint terrorists as cowardly monsters. My opinion - fine, go ahead and think that, if it makes you sleep better at night and feel good about yourself. But doing so doesn't illuminate the problem in anyway. That is perhaps the saving grace of political science - it means deconstructing problems. The purpose isn't to hang people, or to deem them monsters. The purpose is to understand the reasons for human behaviour and resolve them. The coercive power of an ill-conceived faith, a poor, destitute and impoverished existence, a rage and desire to blame someone for it, as well as the loss of some family member, a wife or child. Together, is it not possible that these things could be power mechanisms at play in the life of any particular suicide bomber? Is it not most important to understand and resolve these issues?
Sima
Today, we get political.
It only makes sense, if you think about it. After all, Jon and I, we are scholars (I say "scholars" with an impeccable British accent, so I would advise you to start from the top and make it punchy when you get to the "scholars" part). I said this yesterday with reference to our fights (or rather, lack thereof). Bickering, quite frankly, is for the masses. We prefer to synthesize the underlying institutional structures, tease out the socio-political factors, and deconstruct conceptual paradigms, in order to articulate (and defend) our mutually exclusive positions.
And not only are Jonathan and I scholars, we are political scientists. My brother, Neil, thinks this is funny. He looks down on political scientists. I gave up defending them long ago. I am even more inclined to cut my losses now, given that I will very soon have 5 siblings knowledgeable in the engineering. And so, this just might be my finally opportunity to defend an area of study that I so dearly love. It's not political science, but it's close - it's policy.
First off, I would like to point out, that its not easy being a political scientist. Political scientists have to grapple every day with the fact that they have no idea what they study or how they are studying it. It's true - while economists have their traditional principles (individuals are self-interested, rational, utility-maximizers), and scientists have their methodology, political scientists are no less than a bunch of siblings squabbling with one another. Some like to pretend they are "scientists", others "economists", and even others "artists". The artist types scare me a bit. I don't know where I fit but I'd like to think I'm not playing their game.
But I do play their game; I can't help it. Lately, I've become obsessed with reading the comments the general public posts on the Globe and Mail website in response to specific articles. Some articles garner a whopping 200 comments. I read them. I can't help it - it's fascinating to consider the way normal, non-political science people must think. And quite frankly, it gets to me. Wimpy unrealistic, counter productive sugary naive Jack-Laytonesque comments irritate me. On the other hand, Conservative Christian remarks downright frighten me. And boy are they rampant on the Globe and Mail website.
Take this for example - A 25-year old man was executed in Singapore for drug trafficking. His mother wasn't even allowed to hug him before she watched her son die. Did the comments from the public ever flood in. A lot of them remarked "Good for Singapore - Given the lives destroyed by drug trafficking, the punishment was perhaps not harsh enough". My response? Fine, it's true - drug trafficking destroys lives. An earth-shattering amount of them. But so does AIDS, so does war, so does smoking, and pollution. And so does the growing disparity of income. Who is to blame for all these things? It's impossible to pin-point one individual. As for who is responsible for the deaths due to drugs, prudence, ethics, and pragmatics dictates that it doesn't begin and end with drug dealers.
The lives we all live and luxuries we enjoy are undeniably at the expense of the lives of others. Really. The $1,000 couch Jonathan and I bought in September could have fed and housed the cold and frail homeless man that lives down the street. It could buy anti-viral triple therapy for a child born with AIDS in Swaziland.
It could, but it didn't.
In response to Neil for the uselessness of my discipline, this is what I have to say: You study power - physical power - it's properties, medium, and results with particular embedded systems. I study power in a more difficult, but equally real sense. I study why women contract AIDS more than men; I study why AIDS interventions fail and what are the power structures that allow them to fail - like the denial of a problem by African politicians who believe that such 'Western diseases' won't spread in their countries, or the gender-bias policies that target condom use at women to control men even though women have little power in sexual relations, or the hazardous Christian-Right ideology that perpetuates the problem with abstinence-only approaches.
These are the things that get to me, and I must say, I am growing more and more concerned about the quickness of humanity to judge, to throw the very helpful "treat others as I'd want to be treated" maxism out the window. To some degree, we should all aspire to be good political scientists, to be pragmatic and prudent in what we would think about others.
Consider this actual case: a Canadian boy has been charged with throwing a grenade at an American soldier in Iraq. He is being held in the U.S. and could possibly face the death penalty. Canadians posted on the Globe and Mail article shouting "hooray for the U.S." and "hang him right away". Such haste in condemning a boy to death before even being convicted of the crime. These very individuals would be mortified if one day, they were picked up and convicted arbitrarily for something, while their fellow Canadians waved signs of condemnation and death against them for crimes they had yet to stand trial on.
Another case - a student of mine wrote a paper proposal. Her thesis was "Immigrants in Canada are ruining Canadian culture". To prove this, she said she would argue that minorities are given priority over Canadian in the work force and that immigrants aren't deported when they commit crimes. Again, what haste! First off, minorities aren't the same as immigrants. And second immigrants (who are citizens) aren't deported when they commit crimes because Canada is their country! They are Canadians in the very same sense that this young Caucasian woman was.
I'm not sure where I was going with this but I know it was somewhere very important. As much as political scientists infuriate me for being so vague and wishy washy in their analysis, it's the extreme views of the general public that concern me. As a society we love to blame, to punish, and condemn. We love to paint terrorists as cowardly monsters. My opinion - fine, go ahead and think that, if it makes you sleep better at night and feel good about yourself. But doing so doesn't illuminate the problem in anyway. That is perhaps the saving grace of political science - it means deconstructing problems. The purpose isn't to hang people, or to deem them monsters. The purpose is to understand the reasons for human behaviour and resolve them. The coercive power of an ill-conceived faith, a poor, destitute and impoverished existence, a rage and desire to blame someone for it, as well as the loss of some family member, a wife or child. Together, is it not possible that these things could be power mechanisms at play in the life of any particular suicide bomber? Is it not most important to understand and resolve these issues?
Sima
posted by Sima at 9:03 PM
6 Comments:
You know Sima, you never fail to ask excellent questions. The questions you asked today are almost impossible to answer.
Why did you buy a 1,000 dollar couch when you could have donated it to a worthy cause? Why did I buy a 15,000 dollar truck that pollutes the environment? The answer is elusive to be sure. Part of it is probably that in the here and now comfort and convenience are more important to us than someone else's well being. Does that make us bad people? I like to think it doesn't.
Why are people so quick to judge? Sometimes it's because it's easier to blame someone else than to admit your own role in the problem, be it terrorism, drug trafficking or any other crime. And do not fool yourself, every human being alive today has something to do with the current global situation. From the AIDS epidemic in Africa to the war in Iraq.
Why such enthusiasm for the death penalty? I think a lot of it has to do with ignorance. But that isn't the only thing. I know a lot intelligent, knowledgeable, well read people who are in favour of the death penalty. I have to admit that I myself have sometimes thought it wasn't a bad idea. Deep down I know there is no possible excuse for taking another human being's life be it the death penalty of an act of terrorism, though to the terrorist it is ussually an act on the road to freedom. Sometimes, however, emotion wins out over rationality and people do horrible things. If someone I loved was killed in the World Trade Centre I imagine I might feel differently against the so called war on terror.
But in the end all we can do is live the best possible life we can and try to make this world a better place. Does that mean we can't enjoy ourselves. No. We can't feel guilt about all the wonderful things we experience in this life. And to be honest, I'm listening to some Esthero right now and I feel pretty mellow and I don't really think there's anything wrong with that. I love my life, you should love yours.
On a positive note, you're studying in a field where you could quite possibly make a huge difference in the world. Policy is the difference in the way countries face their problems. You have a chance in the years to come to be in a position to change the policies of Canada when it comes to AIDS relief in Africa, debt reduction in the Third World, drug addiction the world over and many, many other problems we face. You should feel good about that.
I'm dropping out of engineering.
Sima, until you learn how to spell my name, I will be referring to you as Seamus.
p.s. I didn't know you were Irish.
Wow. My very own reference :P
But in all seriousness, the reason engineers and scientists love to mock political "science" is that its become anything but a science.
Not that Harper is a scientest in any way shape or form, but let's look at his quote. He was asked why he was reducing the GST instead of the income tax, and he responded "well.. I beleive all taxes are bad".
WTF? How the hell is that relevant. Not only does it not make sense (a country with no taxes is roughly as innefficient as one with 100% tax) but it shows a complete disregard for intellectual conversation and turns into a Bush vs Kerry shoutfest.
Kerry: "well.. I think that Iraq is a really difficult question where you need to.."
Bush: "FLIP FLOPPING. Hes a flip flopper. Flop flip flop flip"
Kerry: "Well, let me finish, I really think that we need to analyze.."
Bush: "WHAT ABOUT DENMARK?? WHAT ABOUT DENMARK??".
Where really, the republicans won by dumbing everything down into good, bad, right, wrong, right, left, good, liberal, terrorists, non terrorists. And people just slurped it up.
And thats the problem. There just. aren't. many. good. poltical. scientists.
And you can relate this to engineers/scientists. Because engineers/scientists pride themselves on the legitimacy and unpartisan!!!! nature of their craft - and they defend it with vigor. If you bring your bias into your scientific paper, you will be turfed. Absolutely turfed. And yet you will find some of the biggest pundits teaching university political science classes throughout the country.
And it is past time that political scientists, and economics, and engineers start turfing these media pundits and politician catch phrases.
As an aside, I entered a debate tourney last year. It was hosted at Queen's. I showed up. You make idle chit chat. You have people from political/social sciences, a few dabble in economics etc etc. And of course it is the good old "oh... you are in engineering? well.. that will be interesting to see how you run a debate, I dont know how you will deal with political issues." You'd think the debate was in a different language from their tone.
Science topics are seen as "taboo", so I didn't run anything like that, but me and my business parter ended up winning the tourney. Why? Because they aren't teaching people in the social sciences HOW to think. They are giving them the arguments, but not the ability to form their own. Research is all fine and dandy, but why not one in every 5 papers, make someone develop an argument using nothing but basics. CLEARLY outlining the assumptions, and working up towards an answer.
In debates, you get entire arguments formed on silly assumptions or from clear bias. And in front of 3 or 4 educated judges, it's easy enough to rip apart. In front of millions of telvision viewers, not so much.
Hi Sima,
I'm for sound public policy tackling all the important issues, but you know what's depressing, when the profs teaching it don't even believe in it. My impression was that they agree that gov't is inefficient, and that it's going to stay that way, and if we want, we can create organizations to help combat it. I always thought that was batty.
As for listening to general public, I think it's fun to do so, but I'd never really take anything they say to heart. Most of the time, you just get horrified at their uninformed answer. As you listen to them, all you can say is, but but, you're not looking at all the sides, and the greater implications and what this all means. So when finding solutions, it always has many facets, one which looks good when joe reads the paper, and the multi-dimensional one that hopefully attacks the root of the problem.
That paper-proposal thing sounds hilarious, I can see myself trying to hide my disappointment at the thesis.
Deport them all! That's the answer! Take back Canada.
Listen, why can't you just let her write her inane garbage and give her that B-
These days, what's even more scary than manipulation of politics, is manipulation of science itself. Science isn't even science anymore. Anti-retrovirals, emissions-reducing engines and fuels, cancer medications, new aerospace technology... none of it is removed from policy. Not a shred. Not a *Spek*.
While I can appreciate that policy is clearly not a science in the strictest form, science isn't either. Everything in this world is biased, and sadly, most people don't care to acknowledge that fact.
I visited Hiroshima on Sunday. I didn't know what to think, how to feel, how to react, to a place that a mere 60 years ago, was flattened to rubble by the A Bomb. Science. What a wonderful thing it is. But science is also what allowed people to band together, to leave only the A Bomb dome intact and to begin to rebuild their city, and their lives. Science, engineering, modern medicine, and you know what I'll say next. Policy. Without some sort of coherent policy, things would be very different. (And coherent is a minimum here, folks, I'm not saying saying perfect policy. Right now I don't need a perfect man, I'd settle for a coherent one...) Policy is like anything else; there exists the possibility of using it for *dum dum dummmmmm* good or evil, social welfare or social ill, and the sooner people recognize this, the better.
Common people are the first to jump up and punish a politician for his mistakes, and being in the public eye, good on them. But these are the same common adulterers, common thieves, common ... *you get the point* Hell, one in three women gets abused in her lifetime. They're not smacking themselves around, so you have to figure, a good number of these good common people, and the upper class jobbies too, are screaming for the guillotine when they'd be as fit to grace one as any politician.
Little bit of a tangent there I suppose. We live in a world filled with choices. I chose to come to Japan... I don't know how much I am enjoying the fruits of said choice, but hey, it's life. This society is even more consumer driven than the one I left in Canada. Everything is about material goods, your looks, your bling. (Yes, hip-hop has finally reached Japan!) Anyways I need to get dressed for work, more *potentially* to follow...
Lils
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