Brandon Ruiz

So according to the election law blog, this guy is an opportunistic douchebag. I felt it my civic duty to let him know. Also, his contact information is available through ebay should you feel the need to do the same.

The other day a bit of a pitched battle erupted over individualism and as I was reading the paper online, I came upon an interesting article by one of my favorite conservative-ish Op-Ed columnists, David Brooks. I think his analysis is interesting and the article is overall rather good. My only gripe is with the final line because it seems like a rather cheap shot, but it still doesn’t greatly detract from the clarity with which I think he’s seeing the opposition. He’s going for a bit too much of an oppositional either-or setup, seems more of a spectrum (or several intersecting spectra) to me.

For those of you who haven’t been paying attention, PETA just announced a $1,000,000 (1 million) prize for the first scientist who can grow chicken meat in a test tube and make it commercially viable.

“PETA is offering a $1 million prize to the contest participant able to make the first in vitro

chicken meat and sell it to the public by June 30, 2012. The contestant must do both of the following:

• Produce an in vitro chicken-meat product that has a taste and texture indistinguishable from real chicken flesh to non-meat-eaters and meat-eaters alike.
• Manufacture the approved product in large enough quantities to be sold commercially, and successfully sell it at a competitive price in at least 10 states.”

Okay, so first off I’m going to go at it from an economic point of view. A million dollars, really? Is that all? I imagine that developing technology to mass market test tube meats would cost tens of millions. A million sounds like a tiny drop in the bucket.

From a purely culinary standpoint this is disgusting. I don’t know about any of the rest of you, but to eat real free range chicken that’s walked around and eaten worms and corn is quite a treat. There’s not much meat. It’s a little tough, but it’s also incredibly flavorful in ways that store bought chicken from chickens that have spent their entire lives in tiny cages just isn’t. I imagine test tube meat would be even more flabby and uniformly flavorless.

EEEWWW. Does no one else fine the concept of eating meat grown in a test tube revolting? I’ve recently become a vegetarian – okay, well a 95% vegetarian, I’ll still eat meat to avoid offending someone or when there aren’t many options – and my rationale wasn’t animal cruelty. If a group is concerned with animal cruelty, pointing out the conditions the animals are raised in and lobbying for more sustainable practices or offering attractive vegetarian alternatives seems the way to go. Developing meat in a test tube sorta doesn’t.

Test tube meat seems to offer something for nothing. We get meat without hurting the animals. We get meat presumably without the methane. We get meat. I’m not going to lie, meat is pretty damn tasty, but really? Test tubes? I’m all for sustainable agriculture and a shift away from factory farming. I actually wouldn’t mind having a chicken coop for eggs like my dad used to when my sisters were kids. People and livestock animals have a symbiotic relationship and this would completely destroy that relationship. There wouldn’t be a cow if humans hadn’t engineered them from Aurochs. There wouldn’t be any of these animals, especially at the numbers they currently exist, if we hadn’t taken the most docile specimens of the original stock and selectively bred them for stupidity, fatness, and docility.

This wouldn’t really help the animals, without the need for meat, we wouldn’t have the need for the animals. I suppose the next project would be eggs and milk from floating udders or something. I’m not religious, but this strikes me as profoundly against the laws of all gods and nature. Meat is supposed to come from a living thing. You eat the flesh of another you gain its strength and all that. I’m not defending the status quo, I think it’s pretty bad. But test tubes seem like going from bad to worse.

Imagine a world where one private company holds the patent rights to your chicken or your beef. Ok well the beef thing is sort of true alreday. Something like 90% of all Holstein cows (our black and white dairy cows) are descended from two bulls. That’s a disaster waiting to happen, but anyway. Maybe I’m paranoid, but if they started marketing test tube meat I would either want strict labeling or I’d never eat meat again, even at the risk of being “that guy” at dinners.

Efforts should be focused elsewhere. On improving the conditions of raising livestock. Encouraging people to eat less meat. Phasing out subsidies on feedstock to make the price of meat reflect the actual costs of production, thereby assisting in #2. Helping people raise their own livestock so they see the value of that succulent chicken breast as they feed and eventually kill their own chicken.

So I haven’t written much lately and Billy remarked on it this morning, so I decided to give our readers a taste of what has been going on in my mind the past few months. I’ve been tempted to write a few times, but either there were too many new posts on those days or I felt that I needed a more coherent vision of what I was aiming for. Now I’ve got both space and a vision, so here goes.

This is the first in what will be a series of posts on what constitutes a virtuous society or at least a version of a virtuous society. This has to be a series because it’s too much for one article and I’m not trying to talk about a panacea or silver bullet, so it’ll take some time to lay out. Essentially this series will pose the question “What makes a society virtuous?” and attempt to answer it. When I talk about society here, I’m not just talking about a nation, but a city, a community, basically any group of people sufficiently large that they don’t all know each other and are reliant in one way or another and where people are affected by the actions of others. Technically this can go global if you really want it to, but I’m not that ambitious yet.

One of the first things a society must deal with when defining itself is how to deal with problematic people or behaviors. Do we allow individuals absolute free reign to do as they please with absolutely no restrictions? Do we force people to comply with a set of rules by using the police and coercion? Do we control every aspect of a member’s life with a police state? The virtuous society does none of these.

A virtuous society uses a combination of informal social control mechanisms and police power. Before anyone (Tom) screams, I want to qualify the hell out of that statement. Police power should only be used for the most egregious and outrageous conduct. By that I mean things like violence against the helpless, using a weapon on an unarmed person, murder, irreparable property damage (I’m thinking arson or something like that), fraud, etc. This is not to say that there wouldn’t be laws against other things like battery, intimidation, or even petty traffic offenses. They just wouldn’t have to be enforced much and they would be relatively low priority. Sort of like decriminalizing drug possession. It’s still not legal or ok, just not something we’re going to pursue all that vigorously hopefully because it won’t be necessary.

Let’s start with correctional mechanisms. For the most egregious conduct, yeah we can still have prisons and all that, basically we don’t want people hurting one another physically or severely impairing them financially/in their welfare (and if you’re going to bitch that this isn’t a comprehensive list, I know that, these are just examples). For the rest of the stuff we have alternatives to incarceration. What if, instead of locking up a guy who steals some kid’s iPod or who gets into a bar fight, we turn him over to the community? By community I mean his family, friends, the victim, and neighbors. No, this isn’t vigilante justice, that’s why his friends and family are there. I’m talking about the classic shaming session where everyone gets together and asks the perpetrator to a) admit guilt, b) explain their conduct, and then c) decides on remedial measures. I’m sure you could add to that, but those are the basic elements. Now granted, this won’t work on everyone and it won’t make us all sit around the fire singing kumbaya, but the power of group approval or disapproval is sorely underestimated these days. The end goal is to get the offender to admit guilt understanding that they won’t face punishment by some unfamiliar power and explain why they acted as they did. Once they’ve done that it’s a negotiation process where the victim, family, friends, and neighbors talk about what would be an appropriate way for the offender to kiss the boo boo make all better.

The way that this works is we build on a common moral code. A common moral code means that we have an agreed upon set of things that we think are right and wrong, good and bad, acceptable and unacceptable, better and worse. A common moral code requires that the vast majority of people agree on these things, and by vast majority I’m talking maybe 95%. Now before I get any complaints about how that’s not possible, I want to qualify the hell out of this too. I’m not talking about a pervasive every-little-action-you-take morality, but a solid core of what we value. We already have such a core, it’s just not as big as it should be and we don’t enforce it too well. 99% of us don’t commit murder, why? Because we’re afraid of being caught? Well if we just went by our chances of being caught on a strictly cost-benefit rational basis, murder’s not such a bad thing. Ok that’s a bit extreme. Let me give another one. The Los Angeles subway system operates on the honor system. Yeah, you buy a ticket, don’t pass through a turnstile and once in a blue moon a sheriff wanders onto the train and asks people to show their tickets. Mostly they just accept anything that looks vaguely like a ticket without checking the date. The chances of any individual being caught are almost nothing, but the rate of payment is still about 94%. In fact, the city was arguing for a long time whether it should even bother installing turnstiles because the cost-benefit was pretty dubious. Metro loses about $5 million a year to nonpayment, but costs of implementation and maintenance would be high. People are paying because they know they should.

There’s a laundry list of our core values, but I’m not really interested in the specific list at this moment. Maybe we could work that out in the comments section. What I’m interested in is strengthening the core values and expanding them so they encompass more types of behavior. No, I’m also not talking about social control over every aspect of a person’s life. We’re not in a 14th century village, it’s neither practical nor particularly desirable. I’m just talking about normative values that keep people from messing with one another and possibly themselves. I also want to stress that this is voluntary to the extent that it wouldn’t involve state power to force people to accept a core of beliefs. The state might facilitate a dialogue, but it’s not going to be imposed from the top down. This is something that’s organic, bottom-up if you will. A common moral code has to come from a serious conversation about what we value and what kind of life we’d like to live. It’s more than just the golden rule because it’s about how you treat nature, your neighborhood, and abstract entities (businesses, other societies, etc).

Before Tom tells me that this can only come from religion, I’m going to say that religion isn’t enough. Religion can be an element, but it’s simply insufficient both because the language of religion tends to be either-or and because it would by its very nature require physical coercion. Why? Well quite simply that to use religion we’d probably have to pick a religion and well, we live in a diverse, pluralistic society where not everyone has the same religion or any religion at all. We can take elements from religious teaching, sure. I’m good with that, even as a non-theist. We can use some universal elements particularly from multiple religious traditions, but we need more. No, we need a serious society-wide (depending on what level we’re talking it could be national) dialogue about first principles and what we are about as a society and sort of argue it out. Think of it as a moral constitutional convention but with its endpoint being something like the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (or in this case Society X’s Declaration of a Moral Consensus).

Ok before I go on too long, I want to wrap up quickly by reminding you all before the flames start to spout that I’m not talking about forcing people to do anything. I’m talking about approval and disapproval, the casual “Hey Jim you’re a bastard for kicking that dog” type of thing. Also, I’m not talking about pervasive Spanish Inquisition dogma or even Salem witch trials stuff. I’m talking about a basic set of dos and don’ts that the vast majority of us can agree on and enforce. Yeah we’d be our brother’s keepers. I’m also ok with that. We’d also have consciences. Crazy stuff.

So here’s something I found interesting. Parents spying on their teenagers and reading their emails. Fantastic. If my parents had done that when I was 16 I would have gotten in so much trouble. They would have known all of my um activities… But yeah. Interesting stuff…