Isegoria

Belatedly, Egypt spots flaws in wiping out pigs:

Cairo’s garbage collection belonged to the informal sector. The government hired multinational companies to collect the trash, and the companies decided to place bins around the city.

But they failed to understand the ethos of the community. People do not take their garbage out. They are accustomed to seeing someone collecting it from the door.

For more than half a century, those collectors were the zabaleen, a community of Egyptian Christians who live on the cliffs on the eastern edge of the city. They collected the trash, sold the recyclables and fed the organic waste to their pigs — which they then slaughtered and ate.

Killing all the pigs, all at once, “was the stupidest thing they ever did,” Ms. Kamel said, adding, “This is just one more example of poorly informed decision makers.”

When the swine flu fear first emerged, long before even one case was reported in Egypt, President Hosni Mubarak ordered that all the pigs be killed in order to prevent the spread of the disease.

When health officials worldwide said that the virus was not being passed by pigs, the Egyptian government said that the cull was no longer about the flu, but was about cleaning up the zabaleen’s crowded, filthy, neighborhood.

That was in May.

Today the streets of the zabaleen community are as packed with stinking trash and as clouded with flies as ever before. But the zabaleen have done exactly what they said they would do: they stopped taking care of most of the organic waste.

Instead they dump it wherever they can or, at best, pile it beside trash bins scattered around the city by the international companies that have struggled in vain to keep up with the trash.

“They killed the pigs, let them clean the city,” said Moussa Rateb, a former garbage collector and pig owner who lives in the community of the zabaleen. “Everything used to go to the pigs, now there are no pigs, so it goes to the administration.”

The recent trash problem was compounded when employees of one of the multinational companies — men and women in green uniforms with crude brooms dispatched around the city — stopped working in a dispute with the city.

The government says that the dispute has been resolved, but nothing has been done to repair the damage to the informal system that once had the zabaleen take Cairo’s trash home.

J. B. S. Haldane was quite a character, one of the founders of modern population genetics and a rabid Communist. He famously remarked that important theories go through four stages of acceptance:

1. This is worthless nonsense.
2. This is an interesting, but perverse, point of view.
3. This is true, but quite unimportant.
4. I always said so.

C. S. Lewis was, of course, a Christian apologist — perhaps better known for his children’s fantasy novels, The Chronicles of Narnia. But Lewis also wrote science fiction. David Foster summarizes the third novel of Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy, That Hideous Strength:

Mark, a young sociologist, is hired by a government agency called NICE — the National Institute for Coordinated Experimentation — having as its stated mission the application of science to social problems. (Unbelievably, today the real-life British agency which establishes rationing policies for healthcare is also called NICE.) In the novel, NICE turns out to be a conspiracy devoted to very diabolical purposes, as Mark gradually discovers. It also turns out that the main reason NICE wanted to hire Mark is to get control of his wife, Jane (maiden name: Tudor) who has clairvoyant powers. The NICE officials want to use Jane’s abilities to get in touch with the magician Merlin and to effect a junction between modern scientific power and the ancient powers of magic, thereby bringing about the enslavement of mankind and worse. Jane, though, becomes involved with a group which represents the polar opposite of NICE, led by a philology professor named Ransom, who is clearly intended as a Christ-figure. The conflict between NICE and the Ransom group will determine the future of humanity.

In 1946, Haldane criticized the novels, and Foster finds the exchange between the two still relevant to our current political and philosophical landscape. Consider Lewis’s thoughts on money and power, in response to Haldane’s celebration that “Mammon has been cleared off a sixth of our planet’s surface [the USSR]”:

The difference between us is that the Professor sees the ‘World’ purely in terms of those threats and those allurements which depend on money. I do not. The most ‘worldly’ society I have ever lived in is that of schoolboys: most worldly in the cruelty and arrogance of the strong, the toadyism and mutual treachery of the weak, and the unqualified snobbery of both. Nothing was so base that most members of the school proletariat would not do it, or suffer it, to win the favour of the school aristocracy: hardly any injustice too bad for the aristocracy to practise. But the class system did not in the least depend on the amount of pocket money. Who needs to care about money if most of the things he wants will be offered by cringing servility and the remainder can be taken by force?

This lesson has remained with me all my life. That is one of the reasons why I cannot share Professor Haldanes exaltation at the banishment of Mammon from ‘a sixth of our planet’s surface’. I have already lived in a world from which Mammon was banished: it was the most wicked and miserable I have yet known. If Mammon were the only devil, it would be another matter. But where Mammon vacates the throne, how if Moloch takes his place?

As Aristotle said, ‘Men do not become tyrants in order to keep warm’. All men, of course, desire pleasure and safety. But all men also desire power and all men desire the mere sense of being ‘in the know’ or the ‘inner ring’, of not being ‘outsiders’: a passion insufficiently studied and the chief theme of my story. When the state of society is such that money is the passport to all these prizes, then of course money will be the prime temptation. But when the passport changes, the desires will remain.

On centralized scientific planning:

Every tyrant must begin by claiming to have what his victims respect and to give what they want. The majority in most modern countries respect science and want to be planned. And, therefore, almost by definition, if any man or group wishes to enslave us it will of course describe itself as ’scientific planned democracy’.
[...]
My fears of such a tyranny will seem to the Professor either insincere or pusillanimous. For him the danger is all in the opposite direction, in the chaotic selfishness of individualism. I must try to explain why I fear more the disciplined cruelty of some ideological oligarchy. The Professor has his own explanation of this; he thinks I am unconsciously motivated by the fact that I ’stand to lose by social change’. And indeed it would be hard for me to welcome a change which might well consign me to a concentration camp. I might add that it would be likewise easy for the Professor to welcome a change which might place him in the highest rank of an omnicompetent oligarchy. That is why the motive game is so uninteresting. Each side can go on playing ad nauseam, but when all the mud has been flung every man’s views still remain to be considered on their merits.

On democracy — which looks an awful lot like conservatism:

I am a democrat because I believe that no man or group of men is good enough to be trusted with uncontrolled power over others. And the higher the pretensions of such power, the more dangerous I think it both to the rulers and to the subjects. Hence Theocracy is the worst of all governments. If we must have a tyrant a robber baron is far better than an inquisitor. The baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity at some point be sated; and since he dimly knows he is doing wrong he may possibly repent. But the inquisitor who mistakes his own cruelty and lust of power and fear for the voice of Heaven will torment us infinitely because he torments us with the approval of his own conscience and his better impulses appear to him as temptations. And since Theocracy is the worst, the nearer any government approaches to Theocracy the worse it will be. A metaphysic, held by the rulers with the force of a religion, is a bad sign. It forbids them, like the inquisitor, to admit any grain of truth or good in their opponents, it abrogates the ordinary rules of morality, and it gives a seemingly high, super-personal sanction to all the very ordinary human passions by which, like other men, the rulers will frequently be actuated. In a word, it forbids wholesome doubt. A political programme can never in reality be more than probably right. We never know all the facts about the present and we can only guess the future. To attach to a party programme — whose highest real claim is to reasonable prudence — the sort of assent which we should reserve for demonstrable theorems, is a kind of intoxication.
[...]
Being a democrat, I am opposed to all very drastic and sudden changes of society (in whatever direction) because they never in fact take place except by a particular technique. That technique involves the seizure of power by a small, highly disciplined group of people; the terror and the secret police follow, it would seem, automatically. I do not think any group good enough to have such power. They are men of like passions with ourselves. The secrecy and discipline of their organisation will have already inflamed in them that passion for the inner ring which I think at least as corrupting as avarice; and their high ideological pretensions will have lent all their passions the dangerous prestige of the Cause. Hence, in whatever direction the change is made, it is for me damned by its modus operandi. The worst of all public dangers is the committee of public safety. The character in That Hideous Strength whom the Professor never mentions is Miss Hardcastle, the chief of the secret police. She is the common factor in all revolutions; and, as she says, you won’t get anyone to do her job well unless they get some kick out of it.

Eliezer Yudkowsky examines why our kind can’t cooperate — meaning his kind, the atheist, libertarian, technophile, sf-fan, early-adopter, programmer, etc. crowd — which leads him to ask, How do things work on the Dark Side?

The respected leader speaks, and there comes a chorus of pure agreement: if there are any who harbor inward doubts, they keep them to themselves. So all the individual members of the audience see this atmosphere of pure agreement, and they feel more confident in the ideas presented — even if they, personally, harbored inward doubts, why, everyone else seems to agree with it.

(“Pluralistic ignorance” is the standard label for this.)

If anyone is still unpersuaded after that, they leave the group (or in some places, are executed) — and the remainder are more in agreement, and reinforce each other with less interference.

(I call that “evaporative cooling of groups“.)

The ideas themselves, not just the leader, generate unbounded enthusiasm and praise. The halo effect is that perceptions of all positive qualities correlate — e.g. telling subjects about the benefits of a food preservative made them judge it as lower-risk, even though the quantities were logically uncorrelated. This can create a positive feedback effect that makes an idea seem better and better and better, especially if criticism is perceived as traitorous or sinful.

(Which I term the “affective death spiral“.)

So these are all examples of strong Dark Side forces that can bind groups together.

And presumably we would not go so far as to dirty our hands with such…

Therefore, as a group, the Light Side will always be divided and weak. Atheists, libertarians, technophiles, nerds, science-fiction fans, scientists, or even non-fundamentalist religions, will never be capable of acting with the fanatic unity that animates radical Islam. Technological advantage can only go so far; your tools can be copied or stolen, and used against you. In the end the Light Side will always lose in any group conflict, and the future inevitably belongs to the Dark.

There’s much more. Read the whole thing.

Istanbul’s crime conundrum, Claire Berlinski says, is that it’s one of the world’s safest cities, but burglaries are booming. So, why is Istanbul so safe?

Istanbul’s residents are religious, their values are traditional, their families are intact, they don’t drink much, they keep an eagle eye on their kids, they are nosy, their streets are busy, and if they see someone committing a crime, they beat him to a pulp. It’s a near-perfect crime-fighting formula.

Start with religion and values. Turkey is officially secular, but 99.8 percent of its citizens are self-identified Muslims, and almost all believe in God. Turkish culture is obsessively preoccupied with honor, and to be seen as a criminal is immensely shameful. Tantan describes the stigma attached to crime: “If you commit theft, there’s no way you can ever walk around again or show your face, even to your family or the people closest to you.” Every Turk with whom I have spoken agrees.

Next, Turkish families. Only 6 percent of Turkish marriages end in divorce — as opposed to roughly 55 percent in the United States — and 90 percent of Turkish households are either nuclear, with both parents in the home, or extended by grandparents and other relatives. If the extended family doesn’t live in the same home, it usually lives nearby. Only a tiny minority of children are raised by single parents; having a child out of wedlock is shameful, and so is permitting one’s elderly parents to fend for themselves or putting them in a group home. Given what we know about the propensity of single-parent households to produce criminal offspring in the West, it’s hard to doubt the connection between Turkey’s intact families and Istanbul’s (mostly) low crime rate.

Moreover, out of both custom and economic necessity, children here tend to live with their parents until they get married. Parents consider it their right and duty to decide whether their children’s friends are suitable and to know where their children are at all times. As a consequence, unsupervised young people tend not to roam the streets at all hours. And if they are on the streets, at any time of the day, they’re sober. Alcohol is not alien to Turkish culture — old Turkish poetry is replete with references to wine — but most Turks, especially if they are pious, do not drink much. Public drunkenness, which is considered shameful, is extremely rare.

People in Istanbul watch, judge, and look out for one another in a way that people don’t, for example, in Paris, where I lived for five years without knowing my neighbors’ names. Istanbul is a city of busybodies — another reason for the rarity of violent crime. If I so much as drop a heavy dictionary on my floor, the shrieking hysteric who lives below me will be at my door in seconds to investigate.

I am friends with a martial-arts instructor whose apartment is in a poorer, conservative neighborhood. When he started giving lessons there, the neighbors called the police. They had seen young men going in; they had heard grunting and thumping; and they had seen the same men leaving, sweaty and exhausted. They came to the obvious conclusion: he was running a whorehouse. My friend knew that he would never be able to convince them that everything was aboveboard, and knew as well that if it continued, they would lynch him. The words “mind your own business” would have been useless. He moved the lessons elsewhere. As that story suggests, Istanbul has what Tantan calls “a culture of safety.” Obnoxious, even oppressive, this constant meddling nevertheless has a bright side: a Kitty Genovese story in Istanbul would be hard to imagine.

The density of Istanbul’s population and the vibrancy of its street life also ensure that potential wrongdoers are unlikely to escape the eyes of its inhabitants. In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs famously described the role of sidewalks in ensuring public safety: “There must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to what we might call the natural proprietors of the street…. The sidewalk must have users on it fairly continuously, both to add to the numbers of effective eyes on the street and to induce the people in the buildings along the street to watch it in sufficient numbers…. Large numbers of people entertain themselves, off and on, by watching street activity.”

Jacobs might have been describing Istanbul, whose sidewalks bustle with commerce. Almost every street in Istanbul is lined with small grocers and shopkeepers. They stand on the sidewalks most of the time, even in cold weather, socializing with one another and keeping watch over the neighborhood well into the night. They know who belongs and who doesn’t. When I walk down my street, five or six shopkeepers greet me, know me by name, ask me how I am, and would doubtless defend me if I found myself threatened or harassed. Turkey is patriarchal, but in this regard it’s also chivalrous.

That patriarchal culture — along with the low rates of female employment to which it gives rise, especially among older women in more religious and conservative families — also contributes to the city’s safety. Stuck at home, many of these women are frustrated and bored. Not only do they mind their children’s business; they mind everyone else’s. Having nothing better to do, they spend their lives looking out their windows and squawking excitedly if they see anything amiss.

A final, and critical, ingredient in Istanbul’s safety is vigilantism. If you commit a crime and get caught, odds are you’ll get a good thrashing. Not long ago, I was sitting at an outdoor café when a disheveled man wandered by, arguing madly with imaginary demons. For some reason, he felt moved to grab a handful of garbage from a nearby bin and throw it at a table of diners. The owner of the restaurant charged over, beat him savagely, then grabbed him by the collar and threw him into the busy street, where only luck saved him from being hit by a car.

I’ve seen this sort of thing more than once, and it is not pretty. This kind of justice is neither blind nor merciful. Taking the law into one’s own hands is just as illegal, on the books, in Turkey as it is in America, but the cops tend to look the other way when it happens. When I reported that my apartment had been burgled, I asked the police officers at the station what the law would have allowed me to do, precisely, had I woken up and confronted the intruder. “The law says you can defend yourself with proportionate force,” said one detective in an officious, pencil-pushing way. Then his tone grew sly. “But if he got frightened and tried to flee — off the balcony, say” — my balcony is five stories from the ground — “well, these things happen!” He chuckled, and so did all the other cops.

So, why all the burglaries?

The rights of children have been at the top of Turkey’s legal-reform project: it is now nearly impossible to incarcerate them here, just as it is in Europe. Obviously, the protection of children is a welcome development, but it also creates a perverse incentive for criminals to exploit them: even those children who are caught red-handed can be back at work the next day. In response to the question, “Why burglary, but not mugging?,” could the answer be that kids simply aren’t very good at mugging adults? They’re terrific little burglars, though — they can get through windows that adults can’t squeeze through. They’re light, so they can climb stairs and pad through apartments without waking people up.