So it turns out the Swedes have expelled a student from their premier medical school because (a) he's a Nazi (or at least was one), and (b) he is a convicted murderer, who served six years in prison and was currently serving on parole. Ever since a friend of mine from high school was convicted, I've always been interested about issues of rehabilitation and reincorporation into society. Ostensibly, our system dictates that upon completion of serving a sentence, the individual is considered to have repaid their debt to society, no? Even when we sentence serial murders to 934 years in prison, we maintain an implicit assumption that if they were capable of living that long, they would have paid their due. On those grounds, it would say that, having served his time, and abiding by the terms of his parole murder should not disqualify him from becoming a doctor.
If we're going to assume that even after serving a prison sentence he is still unfit to re-enter society, then that begs two questions: (a) for sufficiently egregious crimes, like murder (let's say first degree) or rape, if we assume they will always be a burden to society in prison and a threat outside, it seems like we could make a strong case for capital punishment. Even though we hope he won't commit another murder, it's better to take the life of one definitely dangerous/unsavory/guilty party than to risk the lives of, at least, another innocent, especially when our lack of forgiveness and reintegration is predicated upon a concern that the probability of a repeat is a better than even chance. Self-defense, both individually and socially, demands no less. So, to say he should not be a doctor because he might kill again is an argument for why we should kill him first, and covers the instances where the risk/fear/likelihood of him killing again are better than even.
This also leads to situations where we think he won't kill again, but we aren't convinced he'll never kill, i.e. we think something like "his murder was really inflamed passions and drinking" (2nd degree or manslaughter). At this point, we are more concerned about issues of justice than self-preservation, which begs the second question (b): if we aren't going to consider serving prison sentences sufficient to re-integrate criminals into society then why lock them away at all? Yes, we say it is to punish the offender and to give them a taste of what they're missing, but that's retributive justice, and flawed justice at that. In theory, retributive justice is to return upon the criminal punishment commensurate to the crime they committed. An-eye-for-an-eye is harsh, but it isn't a-life-for-an-eye. It must be proportional, otherwise the state incurs a debt in reverse. So if we're sending people to prison to compensate for the crime they committed, then retributive justice argues they've paid their dues and they should come back. Our failure to reintegrate them therefore implies either (1) the prison sentence was insufficient if they get out and still have to pay off a public debt by wearing their scarlet letter (meaning our Nazi friend should be a doctor, he just needs more years behind bars first, but how many?), or (2) sending them to prison was never about justice, it was about revenge, hardly an activity suited to a just or advanced civilization, and we want to hound our Nazi for the rest of his life. So if we're left with the idea that our failure to reintegrate them into society means the taxpayers wasted huge sums of money keeping them in prison in the first place (our half measure was worse than no measure) without realizing justice, or we're petty and/or cruel.
My overall point is this: what does our disinclination about accepting this man say about us, about our society, and about our glass house?
Friday, January 25, 2008
Friday, January 18, 2008
Sex, love, the pill and divorce
Somehow, this week has had a fascinating one for sex. First, we had a two-part series at Slate with an economists take on incarceration rates, female education, the pill, and divorce; the second the cover piece of Time discussing the biology and neurochemistry of dating and sex. Both articles are fascinating reads (and I'm essentially going to summarize the relevant points, for you lazy readers), but the interesting similarity between the two is the argument (/implication) that the pill bears considerable responsibility for the rising rates of divorce.
For the economist of Slate, the process works like this: Women before the pill were subject to the whims of getting pregnant. Once you control that variable in a woman's life, suddenly a woman can pursue education, jobs, and careers that involve significant preparatory training or schooling, law, for example. (A fascinating statistic is the notation that each year a woman delays before her first pregnancy raises her lifetime earnings by 10%.)
The flip side is a feedback cycle the author notes that where "no fault" divorce became established, women needed to retain employability in case their husband ditched them. But because they were employable, they were also capable of ditching their lousy, cheap-ass husband and striking out on her own. "No fault" divorce on it's own couldn't have enabled to rates of divorces, after all, what's the point of a girl leaving a bad marriage if she can't fend for herself because she's uneducated or doesn't have enough training for a job to take care of her and the kids? Only when women were sufficiently empowered by the training, education and experience afforded to them by the pill could they afford to walk out the door.
Framed in this way, the high rates of divorce aren't an erosion of social values, they're natural adjustments in people's lives as they realize they didn't quite know who or what they were getting involved in. It gets mentioned in passing divorcees are, in general, happier a year than widowers or widows; a statistic that certainly reinforces divorce as a correction. Even so, the relationship between "no fault" divorce and an population of educated, experienced and ambitious women appears to be a natural elevation of divorce.
The relevance of that second article addresses how well women select their mates. As it turns out, women on the pill have a fairly bad track record for selecting genetically compatible mates. Some of the genes responsible for controlling the immune system are known as major histocompatibility complex (MHC). These genes are primarily responsible for controlling tissue rejection, so if your mate's genes are too similar to yours, your babies are self-aborted in the womb. Among their many other traits, women can smell the genes (and taste, via kissing; fun and educational!), meaning women can subconsciously evaluate a prospective mate's compatibility and therefore the likelihood a child would be carried to term. Except that women on the pill can't. The result is women coming off the pill to have children and suddenly correctly reading all the signals they should have been reading ages ago. They realize their mate sucks (genetically speaking) and want to move on to other prospects, i.e. divorce.
To finally interject my own voice into all of this, it all suggests that as things currently stand, and while divorce is certainly not inevitable, divorce is a factor that must accepted in modern relationships. For better or for worse, the narrative of our life's romantic arc is again corrupted. Just as we aren't really sure what dating is, or how it's different than hooking up, we can no longer be sure that our "true" love will be with us 'til death do us part. I'm certainly not suggesting this is the unavoidable outcome of dating; I'm no where close to that nihilistic. Instead I'm simply saying that the idea of permanent self-actualization through your spouse doesn't quite seem so self-evident either.
If we approach marriage as a job, as the author of the Slate article argues, then can we really expect anything different from our generation? If we're impermanent enough to take 8-10 jobs over the course of our professional career, do we really have grounds to be all that shocked or surprised over a few marriages?
For the economist of Slate, the process works like this: Women before the pill were subject to the whims of getting pregnant. Once you control that variable in a woman's life, suddenly a woman can pursue education, jobs, and careers that involve significant preparatory training or schooling, law, for example. (A fascinating statistic is the notation that each year a woman delays before her first pregnancy raises her lifetime earnings by 10%.)
The flip side is a feedback cycle the author notes that where "no fault" divorce became established, women needed to retain employability in case their husband ditched them. But because they were employable, they were also capable of ditching their lousy, cheap-ass husband and striking out on her own. "No fault" divorce on it's own couldn't have enabled to rates of divorces, after all, what's the point of a girl leaving a bad marriage if she can't fend for herself because she's uneducated or doesn't have enough training for a job to take care of her and the kids? Only when women were sufficiently empowered by the training, education and experience afforded to them by the pill could they afford to walk out the door.
Framed in this way, the high rates of divorce aren't an erosion of social values, they're natural adjustments in people's lives as they realize they didn't quite know who or what they were getting involved in. It gets mentioned in passing divorcees are, in general, happier a year than widowers or widows; a statistic that certainly reinforces divorce as a correction. Even so, the relationship between "no fault" divorce and an population of educated, experienced and ambitious women appears to be a natural elevation of divorce.
The relevance of that second article addresses how well women select their mates. As it turns out, women on the pill have a fairly bad track record for selecting genetically compatible mates. Some of the genes responsible for controlling the immune system are known as major histocompatibility complex (MHC). These genes are primarily responsible for controlling tissue rejection, so if your mate's genes are too similar to yours, your babies are self-aborted in the womb. Among their many other traits, women can smell the genes (and taste, via kissing; fun and educational!), meaning women can subconsciously evaluate a prospective mate's compatibility and therefore the likelihood a child would be carried to term. Except that women on the pill can't. The result is women coming off the pill to have children and suddenly correctly reading all the signals they should have been reading ages ago. They realize their mate sucks (genetically speaking) and want to move on to other prospects, i.e. divorce.
To finally interject my own voice into all of this, it all suggests that as things currently stand, and while divorce is certainly not inevitable, divorce is a factor that must accepted in modern relationships. For better or for worse, the narrative of our life's romantic arc is again corrupted. Just as we aren't really sure what dating is, or how it's different than hooking up, we can no longer be sure that our "true" love will be with us 'til death do us part. I'm certainly not suggesting this is the unavoidable outcome of dating; I'm no where close to that nihilistic. Instead I'm simply saying that the idea of permanent self-actualization through your spouse doesn't quite seem so self-evident either.
If we approach marriage as a job, as the author of the Slate article argues, then can we really expect anything different from our generation? If we're impermanent enough to take 8-10 jobs over the course of our professional career, do we really have grounds to be all that shocked or surprised over a few marriages?
Friday, January 11, 2008
What is the triumph of feminism?
In the past week or so, there have been a spate of articles amping the discussion of sexism and feminism in the presidential race, from Gloria Stienem's op-ed Women are Never Frontrunners, replies to the same, discussion of Hillary's sniffle, disappointment at the same, and discussion of the age divide on how feminism is framed. All of which leads me to wonder about the present state of feminism and how we construct gendered narratives. To put it this way, would the triumph of feminism be the election of a woman to the most powerful office in the world, or the defeat of a woman on the basis of her record?
For me, I would argue the second. The idea of electing a woman with an ostensibly inferior record appears to be as much about punishing patriarchy as about elevating women, and while that might be nice symbolically, it comes at the cost of leadership and competence to the highest office of our government, to make no mention of restarting a cycle of inequality, not ending injustices. So unless the differences in record are slight enough that the opportunity cost to America is negligible, it seems as though we empower one woman at the expense of the nation, despite the symbol we create for other women.
Rather, a better symbol would be justly fair treatment of a women on the basis on the pragmatic, not the biases of sexism. If we can say a woman lost the vote because she was less competent that her opponent, and not because she was a woman, then it seems as though we've progressed. We will have entered a place where, while we acknowledge her femininity, we are more concerned with her efficacy than her gender.
Of course, her gender cannot be neatly parsed away from her competence. Two issues immediately spring to mind that would explicitly mandate her gender to be a core question of her competency: the argument that women would be kind, gentler, and more collaborative; and the ways in which others would respond to her, such as Arabic leaders. There are myriad more subsurface issues here, but in the end, I think feminism can claim a purer victory to have a woman legitimately lose than to have one illegitimately win. Of course, the purest of all would be a legitimate victory, but that doesn't give us many chances to explore conflicting values, now does it?
For me, I would argue the second. The idea of electing a woman with an ostensibly inferior record appears to be as much about punishing patriarchy as about elevating women, and while that might be nice symbolically, it comes at the cost of leadership and competence to the highest office of our government, to make no mention of restarting a cycle of inequality, not ending injustices. So unless the differences in record are slight enough that the opportunity cost to America is negligible, it seems as though we empower one woman at the expense of the nation, despite the symbol we create for other women.
Rather, a better symbol would be justly fair treatment of a women on the basis on the pragmatic, not the biases of sexism. If we can say a woman lost the vote because she was less competent that her opponent, and not because she was a woman, then it seems as though we've progressed. We will have entered a place where, while we acknowledge her femininity, we are more concerned with her efficacy than her gender.
Of course, her gender cannot be neatly parsed away from her competence. Two issues immediately spring to mind that would explicitly mandate her gender to be a core question of her competency: the argument that women would be kind, gentler, and more collaborative; and the ways in which others would respond to her, such as Arabic leaders. There are myriad more subsurface issues here, but in the end, I think feminism can claim a purer victory to have a woman legitimately lose than to have one illegitimately win. Of course, the purest of all would be a legitimate victory, but that doesn't give us many chances to explore conflicting values, now does it?
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