It’s not very often that I talk about the specifics of American politics. If I speak about politics at all I usually prefer to speak about political theory or a particular issue (like torture, or gay marriage) rather than party politics. However, I’ve been reflecting on my political shift from Republican to Indpendent and thought I may as well get my thoughts down in words.

I voted for George W Bush in 2004, the first year I was eligible to vote. In my defense, I was young and naive and confused. And all that. Nevertheless, by 2006/2007, I was looking back on what I had done and thought, my goodness, if I voted for that man, how can I be considered to be at all a competent voter in future elections? This has been a source – not of guilt, but of self-doubt when it comes to future voting. I voted for Bush because I had brought up to hold small government as a political value, and a strong national defense, and of course, Bush was one of “us” – he was an Evangelical Christian, and thus qualified as a man of character to run the country in ways non-Evangelicals were not. He was a member of the in-group.

I look back on his two terms in office, and I do not see a man who valued small government. The largest increase by far in federal spending on medicine was Bush’s Medicare Part D extension – which was estimated at the time it was signed into law to cost the country $395 billion over nine years. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has since revised their estimates and last year alone Part D cost over $50 billion dollars. By contrast, HR 3590 – the health care bill that passed in the Senate – is projected by the CBO to reduce the deficit by $130 billion over nine years. Small change, especially over nine years, but still a net reduction – under a Democratic president, and an increase under a Republican. Bush also created a new department of the government called “Homeland Security,” on top of the existing CIA and FBI departments. How is this an expression of small government values? He also began wars with not one, but two (three if you count Pakistan) countries with no clear objective, exit strategy, or end point. After all, we were Attacked By Terrorists, and had to Retaliate, no matter how much or how little sense the retaliations made. It has become abundantly clear that the country was misled, either intentionally or through gross incompetence, into the Iraq war. There were no weapons of mass destruction. No imminent threat. No links with Al Qaeda. And now we have been in Afghanistan for almost nine years and Iraq for seven. To put that in perspective, the “official” timeline of the Vietnam war (we had soldiers alongside the French before the official timeline starts) was eight years. Such a policy is not a conservative “strong defense” – this is an offense, a military occupation. I don’t understand how preemptive military strikes and indefinite wars and occupations are a conservative value. However, in at least the cases of Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq, they are and remain Republican values.

And to the point of being a gay person: how does one support a party whose defining policy document calls for an amendment to the United States Constitution to permanently enshrine a 3-4% minority of the population (of which I am a member) as second-class citizens? The claim that they are only against using the word “marriage” has been revealed as the bullshit that it is. Just recently in Washington State, they got a referendum on the ballot seeking to revoke the “everything but marriage” domestic partnership benefits that the legislature had passed into law. Why? It’s not called “marriage” is it? Well the argument goes that it was just too close to marriage for decent people to stand for. Nineteen states, all of them with large Republican constituents have passed state constitutional amendments banning not just gay marriage, but any union of two people who are not male and female whose legal status approximates marriage. The nineteen states effectively, barring gays and lesbians not just from marriage but also from civil unions and demostic partnerships are: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Idaho, Kansas, Louisiana, Michigan, Nebraska, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Virginia and Wisconsin. Over and over again these amendments are voted into law with Republican backing. This is what the Republican party wants: gay relationships ought to have no legal benefits or recognitions from the state whatsoever.

Jason Kuznicki of Positive Liberty recently attended an event discussing the place for gays and lesbians within conservatism. He blogs about it here and here. But the key point is he asked Maggie Gallagher, a ferocious advocate of denying all legal recognition to gay couples: what if he agreed with her? What if he said, yes, you’re right? He has a husband and a daughter. Does he divorce his husband and attempt to give his daughter back to the state? Does he then attempt to enter into an ex-gay ministry, knowing the incredibly low success rates? Does he live a single life, completely alone? What does he do? Gallagher’s answer is revealing, in an unusual and disturbing way: “I don’t know.” Then she hastens to add, “But you don’t have to agree with me.” It’s difficult for me to imagine that a woman who has spent well over a decade lobbying to deny gay citizens all legal recognition of their relationships has not thought about this question: what does the gay person do? Surely at some point in her years-long career in anti-gay politics this has crossed her mind. Surely someone has brought it up. Either her worldview is so small that it does not even include gays and lesbians and so she legitimately doesn’t know – because despite her intense efforts she’s never considered what to do with gay people other than to make them and their relationships second-class – or she does in fact know what the gay person agreeing with her should do, how Jason should hypothetically respond if he agreed with her, but doesn’t want to say it. I honestly don’t know which of these it is for Maggie.

But the point is, for large constituents, represented by people like Maggie Gallagher and the language enshrined in the party platform, there is no place for gay people or for their relationships. Ideally, there is no future for me or for my future spouse (if I should ever have one). We are just to go away and not pester the other 96-97% of the world with requests for equal treatment and certainly not for recognition that we exist. Although I try not to be a single-issue voter, how do I vote for a party that wants me to be invisible?

How do I vote for a party that has become the party of torture? Not to go all Glenn Greenwald here but during the Bush years we have waterboarded individuals, sometimes 183 times within a single month, placed prisoners in stress positions, forced them to be naked for long periods of time, engaged in the torture of excessive sleep deprivation, beaten and bruised detainees by throwing them against walls, never given them a trial, probably murdered detainees during torture sessions, kidnapped and shipped Muslims accused of being terrorists from their homes around the world to secret black sites… the list goes on and on and on. The International Committee of the Red Cross, the body charged with upholding the Geneva Conventions (which we signed and are therefore constitutional bound to as the supreme law of the land), has called what we’ve done torture and in violation of Geneva. And the Republicans want to continue this. They’ve thrown hissy fits at the possibility of sending some detainees to trials in the US. No trials for detainees, that’s being Soft On Terror. No closing of the noxious prison at Gitmo. Waterboarding isn’t torture, it’s a perfectly legitimate way to make prisoners say… well, whatever you want them to say. And they don’t deserve trials to find out if they’re guilty. That’s being Soft On Terror. Treat them like animals! The former vice president went on national television and talked about how he supported waterboarding and “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

Not that the Democratic party is a whole lot better. Imprisonment of kidnapped accused terrorists has moved from Gitmo to Bagram, where the Red Cross has also complained about Geneva violations. Gitmo is still open last I checked. The United States still has not investigated the war crimes that have occurred over the past several years, further violating Geneva (which demands investigations into torture offenses). Barack Obama does not believe in marriage rights for gays, although he does support civil unions (he wouldn’t have gays go back into the “I don’t know” netherland some Republicans want). The Democrats do believe (rightly or wrongly) in continued expansion of government social programs. However, at least there is room within the Democratic party to dissent on some things. There are at least some democrats who object to torture and believe it is wrong no matter who is in office. There are democrats who believe in gay marriage or civil unions. (I just want equal rights, I don’t care about the lingo.) And even if the democrats do want expanded government, at least they believe in the need to pay for it. At least there is not continuous rhetoric about “small government” while expanding government programs and simultaneously cutting taxes. That’s a fast track to financial ruin. At least they are not in awkward and contradictory positions like the Republicans are, who now have to oppose the congressional health care bill on the grounds of government interference in medicine, while supporting the massive Medicare expansion by Bush, in addition to the equally-expensive Medicaid and Social Security programs. No health care reform, but hands off my medicare. Come on guys, really?

And so for all these reasons I’ve drifted away from the Republican party. I now see the party, on a national level, as a sad group of contradictory beliefs, stealing whatever rhetoric is convenient and playing on American religiosity (especially on the gay issue) for votes. In fact, the party is chiefly religious now. Who are its media stars? Palin, Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Hannity. With the exception of O’Reilly, all people who routinely invoke God in politics. They are neither a party of fiscal responsibility nor of small government. Endless wars, endless government expansion, coupled with endless tax cuts. And denying gays the same government recognition that straights get. That’s the Republican party. I may not be enamored with the alternative, but given what the party currently is, I cannot conceive of voting for a Republican in a national election in the foreseeable future. On a local level, well, being in Seattle tends to mitigate some of the crazy.

Ophir (perhaps the only person who still reads this blog) had some objections to a previous post in the comments here. Although I initially considered responding as a comment, I think the explanation is long enough to warrant a post.

Here’s some of the original comment, a little bit redacted:

If your personality and behavior are indeed nothing but the biochemical makeup of your brain then [your choices are] no different from a rock falling to the ground (and not floating in the air) or a sunflower seed developing into a sunflower (and not a tulip or an elephant). In other words, from the very first instant of the Big Bang it [...] was [...] completely inevitable that I’d be writing this comment on your blog.

There’s a lot of assumptions in there that I disagree with, and it would be difficult to unpack them all. But the basic assumptions are something like this: if a mind is a purely physical phenomenon, then human actions are predetermined; if human actions are predetermined, then there is no free will. (Please correct me if I’m wrong, Ophir.) There are two issues here: physicalism versus dualism, and determinism versus free will.

I remember sometime in my teens quietly disowning the doctrine of nonphysical souls. I had read enough of the Bible to see that it wasn’t really mentioned in the earlier parts – arguably the Jews didn’t have a concept of an incorporeal human soul until perhaps the time of the second temple – and the scant few references in the New Testament that Christians built their doctrine of the immaterial soul on – well, these were shaky ground to say the least. The modern concept of a nonphysical soul, at least across the Western world, is owed largely to Descartes, who in order to preserve his Catholic faith in the light of reason drew a stark metaphysical line between the “physical” and the “spiritual” – a line that previously had not existed. Descartes hypothesized a lot of silly things to keep up this presumption: e.g., that man was both physical and spiritual, two realms which never interacted. But if they never interacted, how was mankind both? One of the more famous bits of silliness was the postulation that a gland in the brain was used by the spiritual soul to manipulate the physical body. Ever since, philosophers who like a physical-spiritual dualism have pondered how the physical and the spiritual (or logical, or however they want to term it) interact. I don’t see any reason to postulate such a dualism – I don’t see any evidence for this bicameral existence, no one has yet come up with a good definition of what exactly it means to be “nonphysical,” and as we know from things like computers and primitive biological nervous systems, arrangements of physical components can create logical systems (and, one would hypothesize, perhaps even consciousness). The physical atoms and molecules run along on their own, following physical laws, and as they do they create logical states which do their own, logical things: some logic (software) running on top of a physical, biological system (hardware). While there may in fact be a “nonphysical” realm (whatever that means), I have no reason to believe in its existence. As a philosopher friend of mine has put all this, “Descartes needs to die.” His dualism is just untenable.

As a Christian, when I quietly disavowed all of this spiritual-physical dualism (keeping it on the down-low, having seen how attached most Christians were to their nonphysical souls), I squared this away with the very-Jewish concept, inherited into Christianity, of resurrection. If God was God, then God could reconstitute physical matter into its previous configuration, thus resurrecting whatever creature existed before its physical body was destroyed. I thought of this physical soul – and still do think of it – much as a building. You can tear down a building, but if you still have the blueprints for it, you can reconstruct it. The human body is exponentially more complicated than any building, but the analogy still holds. The building is me, my physical personality, my physical soul. It will one day die. The question then became if you destroy a building, you don’t destroy its blueprint – so while the thing’s physical manifestation might’ve been demolished, where has the idea gone? Does it still exist? (xkcd says no; I’m not so sure) This gets into questions about the ontological status of information and ideas. I still do not have an answer to any of that. I may not want to say information exists in the same way that atoms exist, but does that mean it doesn’t exist at all apart from its physical manifestation? I don’t know.

Many years after my deconversion from Descartes’ cartesian dualism I read Dale Martin’s The Corinthian Body (amazing amazing scholarship), which explains, among other things, the Greek medical concept of pneuma – usually translated “spirit” – and how that informed Paul’s interpretation of the body. Though this was not Martin’s main point, it does tie in nicely with dualism because he shows that this modern concept of mind-body/spiritual-physical dualism did not exist in the ancient world. There was nothing “nonphysical,” just degrees of physicalism, from light (pneuma) to heavy (earthly) stuff. In short, he ended up confirming to me that the Christian case for dualism was very impoverished indeed..

But whether or not there is a Christian case for it, I do not think there is a good philosophical case for dualism. Physical systems can and do create logical, information-carrying systems. There is no soul pushing around the atoms in a computer. We are a different form – a far, far better form – of information processing than computers, but we are still a form of information processing. We don’t know how we do all we do, but we know some of it, and in the absence of evidence for a soul pushing the molecules and squeezing the chemicals in my brain, I’ll opt for the brain just being the physical stuff on which the patterns of my personality play. It’s frightening at first, but in the end it’s a little bit magical and awe-inspiring.

To the second matter of determinism versus free will: as a former, and repentant Calvinist, and someone who went gradually from Calvinism to more-or-less Pelagianism* before he (de)converted away from Christianity, I have done a lot of thinking on determinism and free will. Not to say any of it’s right, just that these thoughts have been echoing around inside my skull for some time, with all the emotion and logic and passion that goes on inside a human skull.

I was allured to Calvinism by my church youth group when I was in middle school. All of the church youth ministers were Calvinists. And they seemed to have a pretty logical system worked out for it. Though I now think their reading of Romans 9 was miles off the mark, they did have a hermeneutic they used, along with passages like Romans 9 (or Ephesians 1) to back up their beliefs. And this was my first exposure to an attempt to reconcile human behavior and choices with belief in a deity. I did reading and praying on my own, and speaking with various youth ministers before I “came out” as a Calvinist. At the time I found it very compelling. Although there are other relational events that happened then (coming out as a Calvinist to my family was second worst – and bad although on an entirely different plane of bad – to coming out gay), those are peripheral to the story. The story was: I was a young kid, in high school, reasonably intelligent, and totally a Calvinist. I loved Jonathan Edwards, John Piper, the whole lot of those Calvinist superstars. They had their theological systems for answering so many questions.

But what eventually ended Calvinism for me was another question: the question of the goodness of God. Although I would argue vehemently that God could be good while still damning people to hell or saving them to heaven based on his (inscrutable, and almost irrational – or as we’d say supra-rational) will, in the end I had to face the fact that Calvinism raises severe questions about the goodness of God. Either there is no such thing as goodness, and goodness is just a label we assign de facto to everything God does; or there is such a thing as goodness, and a Calvinist God is not good. The first to go was the idea of double predestination (John Piper’s favorite), and then limited atonement (the “L” in TULIP) and I was a four-point Calvinist for a while. Eventually, and accelerated by more study into various Christian thought over the centuries, I rejected Calvinism altogether as being an immoral and monstrous view of God. I truly repented of it, in every sense of the word, and embraced personal choices as the cornerstone of morality.

I haven’t thought about determinism and free will as much since my deconversion away from Calvinism. However, I have found myself, at least presently, loosely in a space called Compatibilism. What Compatibilism says is: it doesn’t matter if our future decisions are predetermined or not, because we still make choices. If, ever since the Big Bang – or at least ever since life started evolving on a scale large enough to be immune to quantum effects – the future of life has been set, then so what? So what if I am writing this blog because a billion years ago a quark bumped into another quark and made a proton instead of a neutron? Even if that is so, I still do not know the choices I am about to make. I have to weigh the options, or give in to passion, make sense of input, rationalize, and make the choice. I have no crystal ball that tells me what I’m going to do. I – along with everyone – behave as if I have free will. Even if the future is totally determined, it doesn’t matter because I don’t know the future. If I were capable of seeing my future choices, then you might argue that it matters, but in the end, in this world and in this place that I inhabit, it doesn’t. And what would it mean for my will to be “free”? Free from what? Does anyone ever make a decision free from outside influences? A decision totally free from inputs is totally random. Is this what free will is? How free is it? Does anyone make a decision free from their life history, from past events, from considerations and suggestions bombarding them consciously and unconsciously? Is it possible, and could anything short of total randomness be considered truly “free”? But that wouldn’t be any sort of will at all, it would just be chaos. What matters to me is that we are responsible for our choices, even if these are not separable from our personal histories – after all, that’s what it means to be living in time – and whether my future actions have some element of chaos in it or if it’s all laid out by the laws of Newtonian physics, I don’t know what those decisions are and I continue to make my choices independent of the future. And so I end up being in that strangely liberating space of Compatibilism. Even if the future is determined, I am more than a rock falling to earth because I still make choices. I am still responsible for them.

This ended up being more about my personal history than a philosophical defense. But I’m a personal being embedded in time, and that’s okay.

*My personal opinion: when it comes to the foundational doctrines of Christianity, Pelagius was more right and Augustine was more wrong. But this is a whole ‘nother very long post.