The Worst Kind of Conservatism

What's 'Conservative'?

This past year the good people of Quincy, where I live, elected a new, Republican mayor after many years of Democrats at the helm.  

Mayor Moore, a young, energetic man, first came to my attention by going door-to-door to all the homes in his city ward, drumming up support, first for his aldermanic election, and then for his mayoral race.  

This enthusiasm followed him into office, where he advocated transparency and accountability, promising that residents would get a report card on the workings of their government.  This admirable politics was accompanied by a privatizer's zeal, economically speaking, notably the scuttling of a stalled investment in hydro-electric power on the Mississippi river.  A developer had offered to pay the city a large annual sum in exchange for a 40-year lease on two hydro-electric dams.  Moore thought this wasn't government's role and let a $5 million investment, that had hit repeated snags, go.  

I soon thereafter read in the local paper that he had focused his privatizer's attention on the city's trash/recycling budget, and applying the same political philosophy, suggested that private contractors be asked to bid on what had traditionally been done by city workers.

With bids revealed, town hall meetings were held in order to gauge public opinion.  The citizens of Quincy were not happy.  The shock of seeing the flat rate that everybody would be asked to pay, compared to the progressive rate that had effectively been payed (the richer pay more taxes and so, in effect, pay more for pickup) was too much.  There was also the key issue of recycling.  Since Quincy sells garbage bag stickers that must be placed on each trash bag set out for collection (the .50¢ per bag helps defray costs), the tradition had been that those who recycled more paid less than those who threw their aluminum cans out with their broken dishes.  Moore's privatizing would remove this incentive to recycle.

The matter remains unresolved as of this writing, but does expose the difference between real and phony conservatism.  

A true conservative, whether Democrat or Republican, immediately sees that recycling should be encouraged and progressive taxation is preferable to a flat rate.  It's only the 'conservative', more interested in toeing the party line (privatization is always the better answer), that would question the conserving of resources, not to mention asking everyone to pay their fair share in affordable taxes.

The most likely resolution to the issue, among those proposed so far, is to raise the price of trash stickers to either $1.00 or $1.50 a piece to encourage even more recycling (the price has not been raised in over 20 years).  This would make the trash/recycling process solvent.  It would, however, diminish tax progressivity, as pickup would be funded partially or wholly with stickers instead of predominantly with tax revenue.  So, perhaps the $1.00 price for stickers is the answer.

What Is Brain Power?

Am I Already Losing It?

You may have recently read about a scientific paper arguing that older brains are slower than younger because they've had so much more material to sift through, not that they're necessarily losing brain power in nosedive fashion as they age.  

And if you did hear of such a paper, and you're older, you, like me, probably let out a sigh of relief.  The original paper and a summary by National Geographic.

What precipitated the paper were studies that showed how older brains lose the speed at which younger brains can retrieve random words or numbers.  But what Michael Ramscar, a linguistics researcher at the University of Tubingen, in Germany, did to come up with his finding was to create computer simulations of relatively full and empty brains, then compare the difference in processing speed.

Not surprisingly, the fuller brain simulation took longer, and Ramscar then had his finding.

But what all that ignores is context.  Here's an example: I open the garage door, fish for the car keys in my pocket, then realize I've 'forgotten' them in the kitchen.  The first thing most people do is feel beaten down by old age and let out an anguished 'argh'.  The first thing I do is examine my reasons for being on my current path.  Why am I getting in the car?  Almost invariably I'll take my 'forgetfulness' as an omen, or sign that, to again use this example, I didn't really want or need to go anywhere.  Maybe I was asked to get groceries and hadn't had time to remember that I planned to cook something from the garden.

So, imagine a test of brain power that doesn't focus on retrieval speed, but instead asks for contextual awareness.  Let's say 20-year-olds and 60-year-olds are given a day of the year, a time of day, a relationship, and asked what would make a good gift from among a list of a dozen possibilities.  I bet such a test would find older brains more adept at picking out the likelier gift.  That's because they've had more practice.

Possibly, what we'd be measuring is not just 'practice', but the migration of brain activity from one lobe (focused on strength and speed of processing) to the integration of lobes (both the former, strength/speed and the other, contextual timeliness) as an individual ages.  

If this is the case, 'forgetfulness' is what we do to attempt to force one lobe to integrate with the other.  And sometimes the result can be jarring--especially if we pay no heed to the little hints we provide for ourselves--in the above example, we might think of watering our garden when fishing for our car keys.  Or, we have an 'accident' on the way to the grocery store, as our 'forgetfulness' provokes all out mutiny.

There's also real mental decline in some middle aged and older brains.  We all probably know or have heard of people who really are losing it.  In these cases medical science is hot on the trail of drugs to stave off the worst.  I predict, however, that most mental loss, up to a certain age, is simply the loss of purpose in life.  And if I'm right, I wouldn't be surprised if 'purpose' is another name for the way we integrate our two brain lobes into a fruitful singularity.