And Then…

There’s something that fundamentally bugs me when when I listen to Tea Party folk. Partly it’s the whole “squishiness” of the movement. Disaffected moderates stand next to white supremacists in an organization whose only consistent message seems to be “anger”.  At another level, though, there’s a theme I’ve heard coming from TP folk that strikes a dissonant chord in my brain. What bugs me is their complaint that the US government (mostly via the new healthcare bill) is exceeding its constitutional bounds. They advocate a return to minimalist government as described in the US Constitution.

So what is bothersome about this? Well, I have a visceral reaction to the notion that a small set of fixed rules, written in a flawed language, can possibly capture everything which its author(s) intended. I believe that one of the structural advantages of Christianity over Islam is that the Bible is understood to have been written by imperfect humans whereas the Qur’an is supposed to be the literal transcription of Allah’s words to Muhammed. The former approach leaves us a lot of wiggle room. When Corinthians says, “Let the women keep silent in the churches; for they are not permitted to speak…” and, “And if they desire to learn anything, let them ask their own husbands at home; for it is improper for a woman to speak in church.” Christians (well, many of them) treat this in a historical context and don’t insist that it applies today. When reading surah 2:228 with regard to the rights of women how are we to interpret Allah’s words that “the men have a degree over them”? Does that still apply today? Fuzziness and being open to interpretation can be a good thing.

So, who gets to interpret the US Constitution? Can’t Obama simply say “the commerce clause is the basis for the healthcare bill”? How about Congress? The answer, of course is “no” in both cases. The Supreme Court gets to decide what’s constitutional. Right?

Well, right away we have a problem. Nowhere in the Constitution does it describe the process of judicial review. Let me state this another way, the Constitution does not subject laws to a constitutional test.  And yet, judicial review is an accepted part of our political process. Congress makes the laws, the Executive branch enforces them and the Judicial branch subjects them to constitutional review. How did this come to be?

Well, if you read the Federalist Papers and some history books, you learn that many of the initial 13 states practiced judicial review and that many of the founding fathers were in favor of it (not all, some were against). Finally, in 1803 (Marbury v. Madison), the Supreme Court struck down a law, declaring it unconstitutional and formally established the concept of judicial review in the US.

Understand, then, why the Tea Party logic is problematic. It declares the US Constitution to be the basis for deciding what powers are vested to the Federal Government, but that document alone does not subject federal laws to constitutional review. Only a broader reading of the Constitution and an 1803 opinion of the Supreme Court require laws to comply with the guidelines of the Constitution.

Once we get past that knothole, the Tea Party folk run into another problem. The Supreme Court, the ultimate arbiter of constitutionality, has repeatedly interpreted the commerce clause in a very broad fashion allowing the Federal government to greatly expand its powers. In 1964, the commerce clause was used to justify the Civil Rights act. More recently, the commerce clause justified the preeminence of federal drug laws over state laws (even when drugs never cross state lines).

Will the TP folk stop complaning about the healthcare bill if, ultimately, the Supreme Court rules it constitutional? I bet not. They would probably complain about activist judges on the Court and claim that they’d made a bad decision.

Sigh. You can’t have it both ways. If you’re going to base your arguments on the US Constitution, you can’t then complain if your interpretation of the Constitution is judged to be wrong. Once the Supremes have decided against you, you are simply wrong. The Constitution doesn’t subject the opinion of the Supreme Court to a popular vote. You can disagree with them all you want, but as far as the Constitution is concerned, you are wrong.

By the way, as a point of semantic clarification, conservative Supreme Court behavior is to respect precendence. Since the Supreme Court has previously interpreted the commerce clause in a broad way, it would be considered judicially liberal to reject precedent and to now consider it narrowly. So what the TP folk are really asking for is for the court to behave in an activist fashion in order to re-interpret the commerce clause.

Hey, you know what else is not in the US Constitution? The fillibuster. So when the TP folk complain about the process that was used to pass healthcare legislation, understand that the process would not have been necessary if the Senate had followed the process set out in the Constitution and allowed a simple up-and-down vote. What they’re really complaining about is that the Democrats used deplorable tactics to overcome the deplorable tactics employed by the opposition.

So, I get it: the Tea Party folk are angry. Bank bailouts, deficit spending, terrorism, etc. – plenty of stuff to be scared and angry about. But to hide behind the Constitution? Please.

By any reasonable measure, I have everything I have ever wanted: a beautiful wife who loves me in spite of my faults; two great kids (one at Princeton another with a good chance of getting in); a big house in a great neighborhood; good friends all around the world; good health; enough money to retire on. And yet, as I sit on my back patio, smoking a cigar and drinking a fine scotch, I feel like there’s more I need (other than to fix my propane space heater, fix my tractor and mow my lawn!).

Yes, I just turned fifty but I do not need a convertible. I do not need a blonde. I do not need to find myself.

I am not at all religious, but I sympathize with those who find themselves seeking God.

I believe that my sense of need is simply part of who I am. I am a scientist and an engineer. Scientists are fundamentally people intrigued by questions. Why does something behave the way it does? How does that thing work? Engineers take things a step further and say, “now that I know the answer to my question, let me build something cool with that knowledge.”

I believe that all humans, to some degree, have the the “quest for knowledge”  itch fundamentally etched into their DNA. I believe that, someday, a neuroscientist will discover that the human brain differs from that of other species because it has a feedback loop that rewards the establishment of new, strong, neural connections with a flood of endorphins (i.e. that the human brain rewards learning by making us feel good.) The stronger and less obvious the connection, the larger the reward.

My sense of unrest is the result of my brain itching to answer some new question or to build some new cool thing.

Not everyone is an engineer. Someone who has the itch for knowledge but not the mechanical and mathematical proclivities will channel the itch elsewhere. Perhaps artists are people who create objects that, in some way, answer their unvoiced questions. Perhaps preachers are people who find that God best answers their questions. Perhaps nymphomaniacs, alcoholics, and psychopaths are people who find that sex, drugs and violence, if they don’t answer any questions at least dull the need to search for answers.

I wonder if, perhaps, there is a correlation between “itchiness” and happiness. Are people who lack curiosity generally happier than those who don’t? I think that’s what Paul was telling us in the bible when he sets forth the notion of original sin. When Adam and Eve ate from the Tree of Knowledge, they lost their innocence and became miserable. I never did care much for Paul. I’d rather be human and mortal than immortal and ovine.

Right off the bat, let me clarify that I’m talking about the physical world that you and I inhabit. This post is not a theological exploration of whether or not God can create an immovable object.

Instead, I want to explore some things regarding which I believe people have unreasonably high expectations, namely:

• Justice
• Elections
• Science

There’s probably others that are similar; things that we expect to work perfectly and are shocked when they don’t.

It is easy to think of recent trials or other legal proceedings where the judgements have been controversial. Most people think that OJ Simpson killed his wife. Many people believe that Amanda Knox was unfairly convicted in Italy. Obama and many others think the Supreme Court’s recent ruling on campaign financing is wrong. What are we supposed to do about these, however?

Courts exist to determine guilt (or, in the case of civil courts, liability). Should legislative action or public opinion be able to override legal decisions? Do we think politicians are better able to mete out justice? Do we think the opinions of the (relatively) uninformed public should count more than those of a jury? Of course not.

Inevitably, a jury and/or judge can make mistakes. Nevertheless, we have to accept that they are the best that we can do and, after allowing for the appeals system to run its course, we have to accept the imperfections of the legal system given that the alternatives are so much worse.

Our system of electing public officials is subject to similar criticisms and a similar conclusion.

Did Bush reallywin the 2000 election? If Palm Beach County, Florida had not had confusing “butterfly” ballots would Gore have been elected president? Maybe not. Is it possible that Al Franken might have lost the Senatorial election in Minnesota if the state had performed a (3rd) recount? Maybe.

Accurately determining the intent of millions of voters is a difficult thing to do. Hand-marked ballots are sometimes difficult to read, be it by machines or by humans. Electronic ballots are subject to programming “glitches”, are intimidating to older voters and, some argue, are more easily subject to fraud. An accurate election consists of more than counting ballots, it consists of accurately measuring voter intent.  Trying to determine intent is inherently difficult.

Finally, in science, let’s consider the recent controversy regarding the handling of climate change data. As you might have read, some emails were recently leaked that demonstrated how a group of scientists suppressed data that seemed to contradict the generally accepted opinion that we are experiencing global warming. Some groups responded to this incident by suggesting that the excluded data proves that there is no such thing as global warming and that the scientists are collectively conspiring to suppress such data, presumably motivated by their desire to keep receiving grant money.

Let’s not get bogged down in the details of the actual incident. There are arguments that explain the actions of the scientists as nothing more than the typical treatment of data “outliers”. There are others who argue that the scientists are guilty of academic fraud but that this doesn’t prove that global warming isn’t happening. Rather than considering these points, let’s pretend that the scientists had, instead, published only the controversial data and argued that they prove that there is no global warming. Would we then discard all the other data and not worry about carbon footprints? No!

Science is not perfect. One group of scientists can perform an experiment and come up with a conclusion while another group performs another experiment and comes up with another conclusion. Science frequently has to cope with conflicting opinions. This is something that the “lay” public finds difficult to believe but is nevertheless true.

The reason why I have more “faith” in science than the alternatives is because science, at least, has a mechanism to resolve these disputes.

The bedrocks of science are reproducibility and peer review. It does not matter if you design an experiment that demonstrates cold fusion if no one else can reproduce it. Scientists may be excited by a new development reported in Nature magazine, but they don’t believe it until someone else has reproduced the results. If, over time, other labs reproduce the findings of an experiment, the findings are increasingly accepted as fact. The determination of truth in Science is, ultimately, an exercise in developing a consensus view based on peer review and reproducibility of results.

Is it possible that all scientists are conspiring to accept bogus results? No! Why not? Because scientists loveto screwe other scientists! There is no better way to get acclaim in science than by proving that the consensus view is wrong. Einstein proved that Newton was wrong about the invariability of time. John Bell proved that Einstein was wrong about quantum entanglement. There is a Nobel prize waiting for any scientist that can prove that global warming is not occurring. There are many scientists (not to mention, at least one funded research group) trying to do just this.

The scientific process, like the legal system and our electoral process, is not perfect. In all of these endeavors all we can do is to work hard to improve the way we perform them while accepting that, at the end of the day, we may have to settle for doing the best we can. In my business (software development), there is an adage that I love: Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good enough. While we strive for perfection in all the things we do, let’s keep in mind that the price of perfection can be extremely high. The Minnesota senate election took 8 months to resolve during which the state’s views were underrepresented in Congress. Can we afford to wait the ten or twenty years that it might take for definitive climate data to prove global warming?