Supply-Side vs. Demand-Side Theories of Liberal Exegesis

"Anti-realist" gives a quantitative version of his charge against Islam:

That said, of course there are still things in the text that a decent Christian will have trouble rationalizing. My claim is just that he'll have lot less trouble than a decent Muslim.

I think "decent" is a bit of a distraction here. I would interpret "decency" to refer to ordinary interpersonal morality, rather than ideology. Plenty of decent people believed and believe in the legitimacy of religious coercion. Some of them were saints. However, decent people can be a political or military threat. What we really want is an ideological transformation such that as many Muslims consider liberalism (broadly understood) as consistent with their ancestral faith as Jews or Christians do now.

If we substitute "liberal" for "decent", then we have a supply-side theory of illiberal religious exegesis. There are four kinds of exegesis of the texts: liberal Christian, illiberal Christian, liberal Muslim and illiberal Muslim, all of which exist, but with a negative correlation between liberalism and Islam. Anti-realist's theory is that this is because it is costlier to produce liberal Muslim exegesis (in cognitive dissonance or some other currency) than to accomplish the same trick for Christianity or Buddhism.

The alternative view would be that the greater relative salience of liberalism in Christianity is demand-, rather than supply- driven. On this view, cognitive dissonance is not a great obstacle to the religious beliefs of most people. For non-religious reasons, Christians want more liberal religious beliefs than Muslims do. If the forces making Christendom more liberal act in the Muslim world, they will (and have) increased the demand for liberal exegesis of the Qu'ran.

"Freedom of Association" Stinks?

Vancouver and the District of North Vancouver face the first summer municipal worker strike since the SCC decided public sector collective bargaining is constitutionally protected. No garbage pickup for who-knows-how-long. So far, fortunately, the weather in Vancouver in July has been more Vancouver than July.

The principal reason for the strike is that CUPE wants a chance to hold up the Olympics.

The Supreme Court preferred to dwell on the social reality of the nineteenth century as described by labour studies profs than the realities of contemporary public sector unionization. The difficulty is that all the reasons for placing some service in the public sector are reasons why they can't be left to a free Wagner Act-style collective bargaining process. If the strike lasts a long time, it will threaten an epidemic. Naturally, the people most at risk are the poor, the sick, the drug addicted. For this reason, since the Canadian public service was unionized at the end of the sixties and beginning of the seventies, every kind of government -- not just right-wing bastards like Harris and Klein, but the labour-dependent NDP and PQ -- have had to step in and legislative alter what free collective bargaining would result in.

Not that this has solved the fundamental problems. It may be hard for those of us born since 1950 to believe, but Canada historically had a first-rate public service -- certainly federally and in many provinces. I suppose to some extent this was a bad thing: America never had a good bureaucracy, but was a more dynamic country in part because men of talent and energy went into business instead.

We no longer have the problem that our best and brightest go into government service. Everywhere, public sector work is synonymous with shoddy work. Public sector unions have made it nearly impossible to fire even disastrous employees, let alone merely substandard ones. Obviously, there are still some talented, motivated people, but everything about the system tends to wear them down.

The solution has been increasing reliance on contracting out. This is imperfect, but that doesn't change the fact that it is the only solution.

I find it hard to imagine that the Red Nine -- living in Ottawa -- aren't at least somewhat aware of this. I know that the sentimentalizing lefty academics are. I guess we just have to be buried in garbage before we do anything about it.

Voting, Truth and Logic: One more time on Bryan

The Bryan decision is still bugging me. I find the idea that a priori "logic and reason" should be preferred to actual empirical evidence difficult to take in the first place. But even a priori logic points in the opposite direction the Court took.

Suppose that the act of voting is a cost we engage in to get a government we want. Whether we live in Nanaimo or Bonavista, the chance that our individual vote is going to affect who becomes the local MP, let alone who constitutes the government is essentially zero. So on this assumption, no rational person would vote.

This argument leads to the expressive theory of voting. Instead of conceiving of voting as something we do in order to get a result, we vote to express our political identity (or perhaps as a civic duty). In economic terms, voting is consumption, not investment. It follows then that we would vote the same way regardless of who was going to win.

This argument may be wrong, since it is premised on people being instrumentally rational. Maybe they aren't. But I can't think of any way to reason about how people will react to information that is based neither on evidence of how they in fact do so or on an assumption of rationality. If Bastarache does, he should publish.