Vectors

Posted on 2012-06-18 by Gilbert

This is part two of a series on Fourier analysis and intuition.

In the intro post to this series I promised to explain how Fourier analysis is similar to the geometry of shadows but noted I would first have to talk about geometry and shadows to explain it. Now I’m getting started on talking about geometry, and the first concept I want to explain is that of a vector. A lot of different mathematical objects with similar properties are called vectors and this series is essentially about exploiting that analogy as an intuition pump. So I’ll first discuss geometrical vectors that can be understood fairly intuitively. In that sense a vector is basically a class of arrows of the same length and direction. Here’s an illustration of the concept:

vectoridentityillustration

Or maybe it’s modern art and worth a million dollars

 

The black arrows all represent the same vector. The green arrow belongs to a different vector though, because it points in a different direction, even though it has the same length. The blue arrow represents  a third vector, because it shares the direction of the black ones but not the length.

Another way to think of it would be as a displacement or movement instruction like “six feet to the right”, which doesn’t depend on the starting point and is different both from “ten feet to to the right” and from “six feet under”.

Now on to things we can do with vectors. If we have two of them we can add them getting a third one. This is done by pinning an arrow representing one vector to the end of an arrow representing the other one and then connecting first one’s starting point to the second ones end point. I drew you a picture of that:

vectoradditionillustration

Here I added the blue and the green vector giving the black one. (The colors are for illustration, the concept of a vector is colorless.) If you think in terms of displacements you can imagine it as a temporal succession: first one yard to the left, then one yard to the front, the sum is what would have led you there directly.

We can also give our vectors names. Often vectors and numerical variables are distinguished typographically so that they don’t get mixed up.  One popular way to do this is to draw a little arrow over letters representing a vector and this is the convention I will be following. So, for example, in the addition picture above we could call the blue vector \(\vec x\), the green one \(\vec y\) and the black one \(\vec z\). Then we can write the addition as an equation: \(\vec x+\vec y=\vec z\).

One might wonder why this operation is called addition. The word addition already means something for numbers, isn’t it an abuse of language to recycle the word for a different operation? Well sort of, but there’s a good excuse: This addition is similar to real addition in obeying similar rules.

For example, if you have any two vectors \(\vec x\) and \(\vec y\), it is true that \(\vec x +\vec y=\vec y + \vec x\). To put this in pompous words, vector addition is commutative.

With a third vector \(\vec z\) we also get \(\left(\vec x +\vec y\right)+\vec z=\vec x +\left(\vec y +\vec z\right)\). In math-speek vector addition is associative.

We can also introduce a zero vector \(\vec 0\). On the movement picture you can imagine it as “just stay where you are”. In the arrow picture it’s a borderline case, because it’s just no arrow at all.  Anyway, if we do that, \(\vec 0\) behaves a lot like the number \(0\): For any vector \(x\) we get \(\vec 0+\vec x=\vec x+\vec 0=\vec x\). In math-speek we express that as vector addition has a neutral element.

Finally, for every vector \(\vec x\) we can find a vector \(-\vec x\) so that \(\vec x +\left(-\vec x\right)=\vec 0\). We abbreviate this as \(\vec x-\vec x=\vec 0\). In the movement picture \(-\vec x\) is just the movement that undoes \(\vec x\). In the arrow picture it would be the arrow that points from the end point back to the starting point. In mathematical language, every vector has an additive inverse.

Don’t sweat the details, the main point is this: vector addition is called addition by a legitimate analogy to normal addition because it obeys basically the same rules.

Another thing we can do with vectors is multiply them by numbers. In the arrow picture we do this by multiplying their length by the numbers. So if we have a number \(a\) and a vector \(\vec x\), \(a\vec x\) points into the same direction as\(vec x\) but is\(a\) times as long. In the movement picture it could me imagined as repeated movement. For example, moving a yard to the right five times is the same as moving five yards to the right. We call this operation scalar multiplication. (Scalar is basically a fancy word for number.)

Scalar multiplication, too, is analogous to normal multiplication by sharing some of it’s rules. The details won’t be very important for what I wish to explain, so I’ll just state the rules for completeness. For any given numbers \(a\) and \(b\) and any given vectors \(\vec x\) and \(\vec y\) we have:

$$a\left(b\vec x\right)=(ab)\vec x$$

$$a\left(\vec x+\vec y\right)=a\vec x+a\vec y$$

$$(a+b)\vec x=a\vec x+b\vec y$$

$$1\vec x=\vec x$$

So that’s how geometrical vectors work. But they aren’t the only kind of vectors. Other objects are called vectors for  being similar to them.  And the similarity consists in obeying the same rules. Any set with two operations that obey the rules of vector addition and scalar multiplication is, by definition, called a vector space. Or, to say the same thing more pompously, these rules are the defining axioms of vector spaces. This is often useful, because it allows transferring some intuitions from arrows to much more complicated objects.

So what other kinds of objects are vectors? Well the example that will turn out important for this series is functions. If we have functions \(f\) and \(g\) and a number \(a\), we can simply define an addition by \(\left(f+g\right)(x)=f(x)+g(x)\) and a scalar multiplication by \((af)(x)=af(x)\). In other words just perform the addition and multiplication on the function’s results.  It turns out that these operations fulfill all the axioms. So, in a way, functions are just like arrows.

Later on that will allow us to transfer some intuitions from arrows to functions. But I’m getting ahead of myself. First my next installment will have to discuss some other things that can be done with arrows.

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My tactics on the Ideological Turing Test

Posted on 2012-06-17 by Gilbert

My last post explained how I came up with my atheist persona for the ITT.  Now I want to talk about judging heuristics and how I tried to game some of them.

I think it pays off to  plant cultural cues. For example, last year Chris did fairly well in part by referencing SMBC comics in his entry and, according to one comment, I might have profited from mentioning Terry Pratchet. As a judge I didn’t put much trust in that heuristic, because it is so easy to fake. But I think it is fairly interesting because it’s one of very few positive kinds of evidence a shammer can send.

A large part of winning is not loosing. What I mean by this is that  judges are mostly relying on negative evidence.  They  look for evidence of fakery and if they don’t find it they pass the entry. That’s a reasonable judging strategy too, because there aren’t many reliable positive signals.

As a judging tool, consistency is overrated. Of course if people say obviously contradictory things they are likely playing dumb. But that didn’t really happen in this year’s test. To actually catch people the criterion must be widened to more subtle inconsistencies. For example, evangelicals and Catholics are quite different from each other and mixing their traits is a sign of being neither. But then we are no longer talking about strict inconsistency. There actually are real evangelical Catholics who do mix those traits. It’s just that I wouldn’t expect many of them to participate in the ITT. So consistency becomes more of of probabilistic thing than the binary question one might expect.  And it fails if it’s pushed too far. For example, I thought  Sweet Tea’s Christian entry was written by an atheist because I thought his personality didn’t fit with his way of explaining natural law. That was too clever by half.

On the side of the faker I think this is best taken care of by trying to create a fake persona one can respect.

It’s worthwhile to pay attention to what the contestants care about. So it can be revealing if contestants give the right answers to the wrong questions. In retrospect this is where my own atheist entry sucked. I lead in with a thinly veiled reference to the atheist canard of belief-in-belief.  And then I end my answer to the second question with “Moral progress actually happened by stepping past unquestionable authorities.” It’s not that many Internet atheists would disagree with that; these two bullshit ideas are actually quite popular with them. But they are also quite extraneous to the main line of my atheist’s argument. If he was real, the atheist I portrayed would have had more important ideas to communicate on a budget of 600 words. But they are things that annoy me, so they are important features of my image of atheism. Effectively that made me sound more bigoted than the real atheists. This didn’t harm me on the main results (Though the reckoning may yet come on the so-far unrevealed attractiveness scores), but if people had thought of that heuristic it would have been fairly easy to figure me out.

The Christian side actually did use this heuristic to do in atheist pretenders who made two much ado about homosexuality. This actually is a theme rife with hard questions and it might be an interesting question for a future iteration of the ITT. But honestly the question was about things where the Church corrects us, and most straight conservative Christians really aren’t all that affected by homosexual actions being a no-no.

Finally, there is another heuristic that is more problematic: We have expectations about who participates in the ITT. Jacob speculates that a genuine fundamentalist would have had problems passing the Christian round and I think he has a point there. On the other side of the divide, last year  an Objectivist participated and his atheist entry didn’t find much favor with his coirreligionists. So we flunk not only  entries missing the type they try to portray but also types we don’t expect to see. This doesn’t quite fit with the idea of judging the quality of imitation, but on the other hand it would be ridiculous to ignore information we actually have.

Defending against this reflects back to the strategy level. Basically the character must be constructed to match a type expected by the audience. For example, I didn’t dare to present a pro-life atheist. They do actually exist, but I don’t think judges recruited through the atheist blogosphere would have stood for it.

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My strategy on the Ideological Turing Test.

Posted on 2012-06-17 by Gilbert

So I participated in the second Ideological Turing Test contest at Leah Libresco’s Unequally Yoked, both with own entries and by voting on those of everyone else. I don’t think I have to explain the concept, because near everyone reading this is coming here from UEY in the first place. (Let’s face it, for the moment I’m pretty much running a satellite blog.)

In this post I want to discuss my strategy, i.e. the basic framework of my entries. A second post on tactics, i.e. on fake detection heuristics and to avoid them will follow.

I wrote my Christian (honest) entry first. On the whole I’m mostly satisfied with it. I had a bit of a goal conflict in writing it though.

On the one hand I wanted to give an impression of the inside feeling and point to some things that can’t be fully explained.  I think I did an adequate job of it, though I didn’t have enough space on the art question. I tried to hit two birds with one stone and also answer a question Leah had recently asked about why people like A Canticle for Leibowitz. That turned out to be a bit over-ambitious for 200 words.  I really wanted to explain how exactly Canticle points to the things it points to. I would also have liked to explain how the post-apocalyptic church has a very plausible feel of Catholicism having changed but stayed the same in a radically changed culture, about the Earth=Eden imagery, etc.  But I couldn’t do it in 200 words and I think the whole answer seemed a bit like name-dropping some famous literature as if I was trying to signal sophistication. But I think my answer to the deference question mostly compensates for that. It’s the favorite part of my answer and I wouldn’t change anything about it.

On the other hand I couldn’t resist the opportunity to do some explaining to the captive atheist audience. That’s really visible in question two (on trusting other peoples morality).  I think many atheist have a very wrong idea of how Catholics deal with authority. To meta-straw-man their straw-man, they think authority suppresses the intellect rather than guiding it. And since opinions can’t be changed by simple acts of the will we must be doing loads of doublethink. I think my explanation might actually help them understand how it really works, so I’ll call success on the explaining goal too.

One problem is that I didn’t quite manage to integrate my two goals into a coherent whole. Comparing my answers to question two and the other two questions they seem like they were written by completely different people.

But overall those are details. Sure, if I was a better writer I would have written better. Well duh, but I still got my message across.

A fairly popular strategy for fake entries seems to be to answer as an alternative or former version of oneself who just happens to be on the other side. This year Jacob and Matt DeStefano admitted to that strategy as did Leah and her Christian friend Tristyn last year. This strategy worked for Leah and Matt, but for me it would be a total non-starter. The problem is that my Catholicism doesn’t boil down to only one question. Some parts directly depend on the God question. For example, if there is no God nothing happens at the Eucharist, there is no afterlife etc. But other questions are more severable. For example, if I had just lost my faith, I would still hold a natural law theory of morality including it’s less popular consequences in things like contraception. There was a point in time at witch I actually came very close to switching to that position. But I think it would make for about the least plausible entry imaginable.

The other extreme of the strategic continuum  would be imitating a very boring representative of the other side.  That was last year’s dominant strategy and this years rules were constructed to discourage it. It also misses the point of understanding the other side.

My strategy was a compromise. From my honest answers I subtracted the parts that wouldn’t fly and then filled the large gaps in with average atheist ideas. For example, I didn’t think I could sell a socially conservative atheist so I made my atheist somewhat leftist. I also made him slightly Yudkowskian, but I didn’t go all in on that because I didn’t want too much of a stereotype. Effectively my atheist doesn’t have much of a coherent philosophy and I papered that over with pragmatism and distaste for abstract speculation. This isn’t so far from standard Internet atheism. Think of atheists assuring us how they are “good without gods” but mostly being totally disinterested in explaining the theoretical side of that. It’s totally un-me though, one of the things I really value in Catholicism is consistency.

I tried to do most of my shamming by telling carefully selected parts of the truth. This was easiest on question 3. I actually can recommend all the art I recommended for pretty much the reasons my atheist recommended it.

Small Gods was hilarious when I read it years ago. I was pretty much as reactionary a Catholic then as I am now and I did recognize the propaganda, but I still liked it because it was so funny. Real me would add that we Catholics still win the funny propaganda game if one looks at Guareschi’s stories of Don Camillo and Peppone or, stereotypically, pretty much anything by Chesterton. And it does get combined with the depth that Small Gods lacks,  though being unsettled for days is probably asking a bit much. For that you would have to go to the literature I recommended on the Christian round.

Going on, I actually do care about empathy, what with my lord wanting me to love my neighbor and all. And while it’s not the first example real me would think of, gay people actually are one group we religious folks often lack empathy for. Actually on some level I would like to pretend they don’t exist even though I realize that is not a real option. And There’s a girl actually does give me a glimpse of the hurt that must cause and make me feel bad about it.  The other shoe is, of course, that I still think marriage is between a man and a woman and homogenital acts are immoral. The church really needs to figure out how we can make the sacrifice we’re asking of gay people bearable rather than adding to it. This surely requires killing off our ew-reflex, but what else should we be doing? There really are loads of hard questions here. And now I’m going to cop out of trying to answer them by sending you off tho the standard gay Catholic blogs: Eve Tushnet and Steve Gershom.

Finally, the classical pieces I linked to actually do stir up emotions I can’t fully verbalize. Not much more to explain here.

But I couldn’t find a way for my atheist to find awe and world-view-expression in a single piece of art. So I think his art appreciation will have to remain restless until it rests in God.

Question two was a little more difficult. My real answer was about conscience-forming, but I didn’t think I could sell an atheist version of that. I know of an atheist who might answer in a somewhat similar  way: Leah herself. But she is a very atypical atheist and I wouldn’t know how to sever that idea from her other quirks.

So basically my atheist’s answer was a sugar-coated “no”. The sugar-coating was basically about listening to other peoples moral opinions even if we don’t recognize them as authoritative. I did this by carefully selected truths too. I can actually endorse all the examples my atheist gave. The minor caveat is that the first example is selected to communicate his leftist sensibilities. It’s not wrong, but it’s not the first example the real me would think of. Also the language is tuned to match that leftism.  I actually think the concept liberals call “privilege” has some merit, but I am far too reactionary to approve of the word. Words have meaning and I’m very unsympathetic to politically motivated language changes. I grumblingly admit that it’s too late for a rollback on “gay” but I won’t give any linguistic ground that might still be defensible.

I also added an atheist trope I’m no longer happy with, but I’ll discuss that in the upcoming tactics post.

Question one was the most difficult. Duh, my atheist doesn’t really have a philosophical system to defer to. Effectively I made him explain why he doesn’t think he should have one. I think this is his least attractive aspect and I wonder if it will come back to haunt me on the attractiveness ratings yet to be revealed.

I think my answer comes dangerously close to acknowledging we can’t redeem ourselves. Basically my atheist knows he is defective both morally and cognitively, though he probably doesn’t realize the latter is a major cause of the former. But I couldn’t make him buy in to the fantasy of cognitive self-redemption that nowadays gets sold as “rationalism” in atheist circles.

So he ends up with a plan to patch some details but essentially no solution.

So in some way all my atheist’s answers are less attractive than my real ones. Take it all together and my atheist pretty much does have the God-shaped hole in his heart we Christians like to talk about. What can I say? I think that’s how it is.

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Hi everybody

Posted on 2012-06-13 by Gilbert

I have an avalanche of people coming over from the Ideological Turing Test at Unequally Yoked. So many people have never been here yet.

Unfortunately it’s more than a month since I last updated. But the blog is not dead yet! This weekend I’ll be posting the second part of my serious on intuition and the Fourier transform.

If there’s anything else you want me to talk about soon leave a comment and I might well do it.

So basically please come back soon or subscribe to my feed.

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Liturgical fretting for hypocrites

Posted on 2012-04-22 by Gilbert

I just left mass early.  It was a children’s mass and I hadn’t expected that.

Now I like children, and I like mass, and I approve of children’s masses. But I can’t bring myself to like them.  The way I feel it’s supposed to be, mass is somewhat meditative and meditative is one thing the average adorable kid sure isn’t.

So I tend to avoid the children’s masses. Last week was, of course, first communion, so I went to evening mass instead. But this week they have a thanksgiving mass and that caught me by surprise.

The funny thing is, obsessing about the form of the liturgy is one of the things I really dislike about Catholicism in practice. We have people who think the ordinary form is a Freemason plot to destroy the Church and people who think the extraordinary form is a fascist plot to bring back the dark ages.  And people on both sides of the for all/for many question thinking this is ever so important.  And I stand aside with the smug feeling of an agnostic looking down on both sides. Because really, ritualistic details are not what the mass is about. For the first few centuries there were no missals and the priests just improvised.  Then we went for some standardization because we are creatures of habit and that’s fine. But moving those details to the center really misses the point of mass. Which, for Christ’s sake, is Christ. Literally. Right there on the altar.

So you might see the irony of me in mass dismayed that it was done different from what I had expected. I saw it too.  Also, I felt a bit guilty, like I was one of the insufferable grumps complaining about kids crying in church.  So at first I wanted to stay.  Then a few minutes later I decided that evening mass looked a lot more appealing than abstract principles.

On the way home I was thinking about what this says about me. God willing, I might one day be a dad. In which case children’s masses would be kind of an obligation. Would I resent that? Well maybe, because I am sometimes resentful without good reason. But in the end I don’t think it would be a mayor problem. Children’s mass would be a very different experience if I classified it as cute kid stuff rather than solemn meditative stuff.  It is actually the context switch that is uncomfortable.

And that actually does accord with my particular weirdness. I’m a natural born reactionary: I don’t like change.  When I needed new bedsheets a while ago I spent hours (unsuccessfully) searching the Internet for ones identical to the old ones.  And I don’t like people changing their look either, even if it’s an improvement.  Surprising change is particularly bad.

While I’m an extreme example, I think other people share this instinct to some extent.  There is a reason we got missals eventually. And maybe this explains a lot of liturgical fretting.  People are creatures of habit and that isn’t bad anymore than liking some foods over others is bad.

It has a downside though, in corroding community. Traditional and modern mass communities do dislike each other and that shouldn’t be so. And while it is more than that, mass is also a community thing which makes it somewhat strange for me to just leave it.  So we  should try to look out for that.

Perhaps I should start by attending a children’s mass on purpose.  The context switch will be much more bearable if I know it a week in advance.

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Today in history

Posted on 2012-03-21 by Gilbert

75 years ago today, on March 21, 1937, the papal encyclical Mit brennender Sorge (with burning concern) was read in all Catholic churches of Germany.

It had been prepared and copied in secret, for doing that openly  was impossible, Germany already being a totalitarian state at that time. The content was an explanation of the incompatibility between National Socialist ideology and Christianity. The Vatican has both the German original and an English translation online. Money quotes:

Whoever exalts race, or the people, or the State, or a particular form of State, or the depositories of power, or any other fundamental value of the human community – however necessary and honorable be their function in worldly things – whoever raises these notions above their standard value and divinizes them to an idolatrous level, distorts and perverts an order of the world planned and created by God; he is far from the true faith in God and from the concept of life which that faith upholds.

[…]

The peak of the revelation as reached in the Gospel of Christ is final and permanent. It knows no retouches by human hand; it admits no substitutes or arbitrary alternatives such as certain leaders pretend to draw from the so-called myth of race and blood. Since Christ, the Lord’s Anointed, finished the task of Redemption, and by breaking up the reign of sin deserved for us the grace of being the children God, since that day no other name under heaven has been given to men, whereby we must be saved (Acts iv. 12). No man, were every science, power and worldly strength incarnated in him, can lay any other foundation but that which is laid: which is Christ Jesus (1 Cor. iii 11). Should any man dare, in sacrilegious disregard of the essential differences between God and His creature, between the God-man and the children of man, to place a mortal, were he the greatest of all times, by the side of, or over, or against, Christ, he would deserve to be called prophet of nothingness, to whom the terrifying words of Scripture would be applicable: “He that dwelleth in heaven shall laugh at them” (Psalms ii. 3).

The Nazi government reacted like totalitarian governments typically do:  It ensured the press didn’t mention the encyclical.  Then it closed Catholic institutions of education, seized the printing shops that had participated in copying the encyclical and staged show-trials against Catholic clergy for sexual immorality.

But most of this was just an acceleration of what they already had been doing. Basically they kept it quiet and intensified their program of marginalizing the Church.  And it worked. Annexing Austria and the Sudetenland a year later, Hitler rose to new hights of popularity.  Everyone knows what happened after that. Any internal opposition remained limited to historical footnotes. Germany no longer was the kind of country where speaking out has political effects.

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Someone is wasting my money

Posted on 2012-03-18 by Gilbert

Within minutes of posting this, it was accessed by two IP’s that had never been here before. One is registered to the Commission of the European Communities, the other to the  Council of the European Union. Both were using dated versions of Firefox and both returned to the same page about 3/4 of an hour later.

The first two visits where shortly past 1:30 am on a Sunday.

I think there might be some money saving potential at the European institutions.

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Constitution blogging day wrapup

Posted on 2012-03-18 by Gilbert

This ends my day of blogging on the German constitution. Technically, the day ended two hours ago, but I didn’t finish in time.  I didn’t cover everything worth covering. For example, a lot could be said about proportional representation, international law, national defense, conscription, and emergency provisions. But for today I’m done and you’ll have to do without my sublime insights on those questions.

The Federal Convention I took as occasion of this special blogging day will meet at noon, 10 hours after this post goes online. Frankly, I won’t be following it. I do have a lot of respect for the office of the president, but the Federal Convention is boring.  There will be no debate and the result is already public knowledge.

To recapitulate I told you about the Basic Law being a provisional arrangement turned permanent, how I dislike the parliamentary system but like its seperation between the heads of state and government, how i would tweak the presidential election process, about the peculiar German halfheartedness about federalism,  about the abolition of capital punishment being an upside and the lack of direct democracy being a downside of the Basic Law, of my paranoia about judicial review and eternity clauses, and of some problems ahead with European integration.

That’s it, I hope you liked it.

 

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Delegation and Europe

Posted on 2012-03-18 by Gilbert

Germany is traditionally big on European integration. And indeed European integration has gone much further than anyone would have expected, say, 30 years ago. In fact it has gone much further than most Europeans realize.

Right now I won’t explain the political system of the European Union in any detail. But the system is generally regarded to have a lot less democratic legitimacy than the member states have.  On the first try of pushing through the last iteration of the EU  treaty it was called the constitution treaty. When it failed referenda in Ireland and France that name was shelved and we got basically the same thing with a new name. But that name gave rise to a symptomatic joke:

The American Constitution has 4 pages and begins “We, the people of the United States…”

The European Constitution has 4000 pages and begins “His majesty, the king of the Belgians…”

In theory, this is not a problem, because the constituent countries remain fully sovereign and the Union only exercises narrow delegated powers. But those powers turn out not to be that narrow in practice.  The power to regulate the common marked, for example, is interpreted about as broadly as the American interstate commerce clause, i.e. it includes basically anything even vaguely related to any economic activity. So lots of new laws and particularly the most important ones nowadays come from Brussels rather than from Berlin.

So how much power can we delegate to Brussels without undermining popular sovereignty? In Germany the Federal Constitutional Court reserves the right to decide on that question. This power is particularly delicate, because, as you may remember, the principle of popular sovereignty is protected by the eternity clause. When the court let the last iteration of the treaty pass, the official reasons could basicall be summarized as “This is barely constitutional, because, if interpreted with proper restraint, it is the very limit of powers Germany can delegate to the Union.”  They were slightly more subtle, but that was the basic message.

Obviously, if we want to continue with the treaties’ official goal of an “ever closer union” there are problems ahead. So what should we do about it?

Pessimistic as I am, I think there is a possibility of the problem being moot.  There is a real chance of the present financial crisis doing European integration in. If that happens, we might end up with a slightly tuned up free trade agreement and the limits of delegation might be a question of counter-factual history.

But what if the European process survives? In that case I think it’s the Union that must change. I’m uncomfortable with the Federal Constitutional Court making that kind of final judgments, but they have a point.  The present process of European leaders piecementally  removing fields of politics from the countries’ constitutional processes and transfering them to a far less democratic bureaucracy can’t legitimately be taken to its logical end.

Pretty soon we will have to give up on the ambivalence on where the Union is headed. If we want it to be a supranational cooperation it already has about as much power as is possible in that mode of existence. In that case we should declare victory on the project of a united Europe and realize the integration process is finished. If, on the other hand, we want it to be a federation, then that federation needs a real constitution of its own, deriving its authority from a European people yet to be founded. In that case we need an agreement on the relation between individual and national equality. I think the obvious solution is American style bicameralism. And then the new Federation needs institutions of its own, elected by the new people and independent of the national institutions.

The obvious problem is that the countries don’t agree on where the Union is headed and definitely not on who would have how much representation in which organs of a federation if there  should be one. So our politicians prefer waffling on.  But that can’t work much longer.

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No direct democracy

Posted on 2012-03-17 by Gilbert

One standard criticism of the Basic Law is that it doesn’t allow the people to ever vote on federal laws directly. This is a point I fully agree with. As I said in my last post, a simple majority at the polls should be sufficient to amend the constitution. But beyond that, we should also have the possibility of initiative statutes and referenda against acts of the Bundestag. Just let the sovereign be sovereign.

The reason the framers didn’t include any instruments of direct democracy was their feeling that democracy had gone too far under the Weimar constitution thus creating the instability that allowed for Hitler’s rise to power.  This story isn’t entirely false, but in so far as it’s true it’s a story of the parliamentary system being unable to sustain the permanent majority it relies on. Hitler rose through the democratic institutions the frames retained, not through those they abolished.

The other standard argument against direct democracy is that the polloi might use it to bring back the constitutionally abolished death penalty. I find it hard to take that argument serious.  As an empirical matter, there is no popular majority for the death penalty. If the worry is about some sudden rage, perhaps because of a spectacular crime, that could easily be avoided by allowing the Bundestag to delay the vote for a few months. And if the people really wanted to bring it back they could do so through the present process, surely someone would be willing to pander for their votes.

So this issue is pretty one-sided to me: direct democracy is the way to go and the real reason we don’t do it is that the political class would loose power it shouldn’t have in the first place.

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