New APPS: Art, Politics, Philosophy, Science

Issue Opinion Polls are Bad Biopolitics

I am not the first to say this (I believe Habermas critiqued opinion polls in Theory of Communicative Action, though I bet he didn’t use the Foucauldian language I’m about to), but I live in what is now considered a “purple” state, which means my vote might actually matter, and so I am inundated with opinion polls. So allow me my few minutes of ranting here. Don’t get me wrong: I am very happy to learn that the RCP polling average as of this moment has Trump down 1.7 points in North Carolina, and down 5 points nationally, with almost no path through the electoral college.  It helps me sleep at night, though whatever faith in humanity those polling numbers restore is quickly erased by the sadness that anyone could vote for someone so openly racist.  

I don’t mind being phoned and asked who I’d vote for if the election were held today.  What is more interesting and disturbing happens when the polls try to get at issues. It’s also an excellent example of the creation of a “population,” in the sense Foucault uses the term when he talks about biopolitics.  Today was the second time I’ve been polled by an outfit that clearly only works for Republicans – in both cases, I was presented with a list of things the candidates have done, and I was asked if I was more or less likely to vote for them on that basis.  The Republicans were presented as having done only things that they clearly thought I would say were good, and the Democrats were mainly associated with higher taxes and alleged scandals.  So that’s the first point: the poll often tries to push the voter in one direction or another, to create the reality it is ostensibly researching.

The more interesting point is the one about constructing a population, which it does extracting a series of “issues” and presenting them as a disconnected set of questions, with no attention to their context or how they might interconnect.

Kajieme Powell, Charles Kinsey, and “Blue Lives Matter” in an age of structural racism

August 19 was the two-year anniversary of the shooting death of Kajieme Powell, an unarmed black man who robbed a convenience store, and whose shooting at the hands of responding police was clearly documented on video from a bystander’s cellphone.  Powell’s killing was within a few miles and weeks of Mike Brown’s, on August 9, and the news was buried in the coverage of the protests surrounding Brown’s death.  In a way, however, Powell’s death presented a more troubling case, as cell phone footage clearly showed to any reasonable observer that the shooting was unjustified.  As I noted at the time, the officers who arrived on the scene decided to escalate with firearms before even stopping, and even their brief interaction with Powell should have convinced them that his cognitive processes weren’t normal (the video makes this abundantly clear).  It took them about 15 seconds from the moment they pulled up on the scene to open fire.  They didn’t bother to first talk to the shopkeeper who made the call, or to the eyewitnesses who had video footage of the entire incident, and their defense that Powell lunged at them was risible. Of course, after a year, the officers weren’t charged with anything.

After the apparent lone-wolf shooting of several police officers in Dallas, "Blue Lives Matter" has emerged as a slogan.  Fair enough: the officers, who were protecting and interacting peacefully with a Black Lives Matter protest, were apparently murdered in retaliation for police shootings elsewhere.  What does it mean to say that “lives matter,” though?  I want to push the point here that when we’re talking about “lives,” we’re talking about more than the biological process of living.  After all, most of us can imagine some sort of tipping point - perhaps being in a persistent vegetative state - where we would conclude that our own life was no longer worth living: that it no longer “mattered.”  To say that “lives matter” is to say something more than the obvious truth that police officers want to get home to their families in the evening.  It’s to say that their lives as police officers should be livable, supported lives.  And if you frame the question that way, I think it is very clear that the state apparatus has failed blue lives.  Not with the relentless intensity or in the same way that White Supremacy has failed black lives (I will say more about this in a subsequent post).  But a failure nonetheless, and a failure that needs to be remarked upon, because it is related to the failure to make black lives matter.

Philosophical SF

by Eric Schwitzgebel

We might think of fictions as extended thought experiments: What might it be like if...? Ordinary fiction confines itself to hypotheticals in the ordinary run of human affairs (though sometimes momentous, exotic, or exaggerated). In contrast, speculative fiction considers remoter hypotheticals. Although much speculative fiction considers hypotheticals of future technology (and thus is science fiction), speculative fiction also includes fantasy, horror, alternative history, and utopia/dystopia. (The abbreviation "SF" can be read either as meaning science fiction specifically or speculative fiction more broadly.)

Speculative fiction is often of philosophical interest: SF writers think through some of the same hypotheticals that philosophers do -- for example about personal identity, artificial intelligence, and possible future societies. Good SF writers think through these hypotheticals with considerable insight. I would like to see more interaction between philosophers and SF writers.

Since 2014, I have been collecting professional philosophers' recommendations of "personal favorite" works of philosophically-interesting science fiction or speculative fiction. Each contributor has given me a list of 10 works, each with brief "pitch" pointing toward the work's philosophical interest. So far, I have 48 sets of recommendations -- almost five hundred recommendations total!

Since the master list is huge, I have organized it in two ways: by contributor and by author recommended. The by-contributor list consists of each list of ten works, in alphabetical order by contributor. The by-author list lists the authors (or movie directors) in order of how frequently their work was recommended. For example, the single most recommended author was Ursula K. Le Guin. The list begins with her, gathering together the Le Guin recommendations from all of the contributors. Next come Ted Chiang and Philip K. Dick, so that you can see what work of theirs has been recommended and why; then Greg Egan, then... well, I don't want to spoil your surprise!

* Stable URL for both Master Lists and other "Philosophical SF" project links.

* Master List by Contributor as of Aug 15, 2016.

* Master List by Recommended Author as of Aug 15, 2016.

Below are the three most recent sets of recommendations.