The (second) last tango

This is my penultimate column as an undergraduate: after this one, you'll have the highest privilege of reading one more by me, and then I'll be off to graduate school.

People care a lot about the first and last of things, but rarely do they give a second thought to whatever comes second-to-last. Consider this my attempt to makeup for this: an ode to—or maybe critique of—the penultimate.

There are a number of directions I can take this. I could talk about how focusing on the penultimate always gives room for the final word. About how, as I gazed on San Francisco bay from the top of a hill in Berkeley, I made the same realization that the characters of Chekhov’s story “The Lady with the Dog” come to in the end:

“It seemed as though in a little while the solution would be found, and then a new and splendid life would begin; and it was clear to both of them that they had still a long, long road before them, and that the most complicated and difficult part of it was only just beginning.”

I could talk about all these things. But that would take me too far down the “ends as new beginnings” road, and though there’s something to it, I don’t think I have much to add to what’s already been said there. I’ll take a different path instead, a path that requires a brief retrospective look at my column-writing “career.” Though I’ve really enjoyed writing my columns, I’ve been surprised by how uncontroversially they’ve been received. I think part of it is that I always feel compelled to try to take potential objections to my arguments seriously, and my language turns out correspondingly concessive. But the biggest reason behind the perceived innocuousness of my columns is that I always stop one step short of my actual beliefs. I leave the argument at its penultimate stage, hoping that the reader will accept the weaker conclusion wholeheartedly and come to that weaker conclusion’s logical—and more extreme—extension on her own. That way, at least, I run less of a risk of alienating readers.

But that is, in a sense, asking readers to read both my column and my mind. So I’ll take this chance to, once and for all, take the final step and make clear how I actually feel about some of the topics I’ve written about.

I think we’re complicit in an enormous amount of suffering of humans, present and future, as well as animals—and that this suffering is made possible by two deep-rooted and pernicious ideas that have a profound hold on human psychology. The first of these is property. This idea is so deeply rooted in our psychology that the libertarian argument that takes agnosticism about moral facts to imply the need to protect property rights is almost a convincing one. But libertarians have managed to sneak a normative claim in, namely that property rights should be protected, exactly when they were claiming to be agnostic about such claims. I’ve condensed a lot of thoughts into these last two sentences, but the point is that property is so natural a concept to us that we often fail to realize it’s completely constructed. The reasons we should protect it are instrumental at best—instead, we’re tempted to take the protection of property rights as intrinsically valuable. But scarcity isn’t the problem anymore, so we have to deeply reconceptualize our understanding of the notion of property.

The second pernicious idea that worries me is the human tendency to make “us vs. them” distinctions. We use superficial differences to justify different treatment when those differences aren’t relevant to the moral questions at play. In language I have used before, we care about the geometry of our differences when only the topology is relevant. Again, this is a feature of human psychology that evolved to deal with times different from our own: we are all so interdependent and interconnected on this planet that we can’t justifiably wash our hands of the suffering of others just because they’re out of our sight or “different” from us.