The Beauty of Pravic Verbs

Posted on February 12, 2022 by hessd

“Still working?” she said as she passed.

“Do you ever get a break?” he said, fifteen minutes later.

Things like this happen for two reasons. I sit and type next a place where a lot of people walk. This of it as a front porch, except that people walk between the porch, where I am, and the house. And then, they don’t really know what I am doing. And it is hard to tell them. [You see the basic structure of the “porch” in the picture below.]

Ursula LeGuin and I have a favorite book of hers. It is The Dispossessed, in which an unassimilable minority is shipped off to a habitable moon and set up as a separate civilization on the condition that they never come back. The people on the planet Urras are “archists;” the people they sent away to the moon, Anarres, are anarchists. You see the problem. [1]

Because the anarchists were very wise people, they understood that the language they all spoke had the values of archism buried in it, so to begin a culture on a new basis, they would have to invent a new language. Which they did. They called it Pravic.

In Pravic, the same verb means both work and play. The founding linguists wanted a language that would enable them to say that meaningful work was restorative in the same way that playful behavior was restorative. The also invented a noun to refer to meaningless routine work; they called it kleggich.

If English has a verb that meant working/playing, it is the word I would use to tell passersby what I am doing on my “front porch.” As you can see by the picture, the front porch is like a long lobby on the other side of the hall from our apartment. When we first moved in, I referred to it as “an extra living room;” then as a parlor (where one would parlez). But my daughter, Dawne, who lives in New Jersey and knows how front porches are used, said, “That’s not a living room. That’s a front porch.” And so it has been, in our family’s language, ever since.

I write three kinds of things out there on my front porch. I keep up a correspondence with friends; I write a blog; I write materials for one or the other of the three bible studies—two secular, one Christian—I teach. The really odd thing about that combination of working/playing activities is that what I write gravitates back and forth from one medium to another. Some years ago, for example, I wrote a series of posts on the steps that seemed to me to be either named or implied in the “redemption” of an Israelite from slavery. Those four “posts” are now the centerpiece of a course on the history of the idea of redemption that I will be teaching to one of the secular Bible studies this spring. Because I have friends who are interested in that idea, I ship it off to them, counting on them to act as critics and editors—coauthors, really, although I wouldn’t say that to them.

That array of things—the subjects, the settings, the dialog with passersby—are why I really couldn’t settle on working/playing and why I could use a really good Pravic verb, which LeGuin never actually names. Last week, for example I wrote the current installment in a course I am offering at our church—this is the religious course, not either of the two secular ones—on how Matthew handles Mark’s account of the life of Jesus. The image I am pushing (I know it is anachronistic, but it is clear) is that Matthew is sitting at his desk writing his gospel. He is cribbing substantial parts of Mark’s account in the process and he has that account there on the desk.

He adds some things, he subtracts some things, he changes the order of other things, he tidies up the grammar quite a bit. In last week’s session, for instance, we dealt with Mark’s account of the healing of the woman who had “an issue of blood.” In the middle of the crowd, she managed to touch some part of Jesus’ robe and was instantly cured. Jesus stopped on the spot and said, “Who touched me?” In Mark, the disciples treated that as a dumb question. Who would muscle through a Middle Eastern bazaar crowd and ask who had touched him? Matthew has no use at all for that kind of attitude toward Jesus, so he just drops that whole element of the story. The woman comes up; there is no crowd; Jesus asks no dumb questions; the woman is healed. End of story. But note that you have to start with Mark to see that Matthew has dropped anything at all.

We paired that story with a similar one, just a little later in both accounts, in which Jesus healed the demon-possessed child of a gentile woman. Again, Matthew alters the account he gets from Mark, but both accounts have Jesus referring to the woman as a “dog”—not one of the children of the house, who would be Jews. Even thought I knew the story, I prepared myself for the woman to take issue with the ethnic slur. [2]

But that made her the second woman in this session who “had an issue”—think back to the first woman—so I called the essay, “Two women with issues.” And then I tried to get back to work, but I had to stop from time to time because I just couldn’t seem to stop laughing.

At that point, one of my neighbors wandered by and asked, “What are you working on?” And that made me laugh even harder. There’s never a Pravic verb around when you need it.

[1] It is actually two problems. The archists problem is how to get rid of those who will not admit the legitimacy of force by the state. The anarchists problem is to built a functioning culture in which there is not state to enforce cooperation.
[2] In fact, if you don’t know the story, she accepted the slur at face value and presented her issues with the implications Jesus had drawn. The two issues, as I now see them are: a) is there a necessary temporal delay between feeding the children and feeding the dogs and b) does feeding the dogs necessarily take anything from the children? Real issues, thoughtfully (and successfully) presented.

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The Anger of the Bypassed Classes

Posted on February 10, 2022 by hessd

Some of the links available in Thomas B. Edsall’s column in the New York Times yesterday have moved me to try to envision a broader political landscape for the U. S. I don’t know if this is sophisticated or naive. I know it can’t be both.

I do know that it isn’t very satisfying from a finger-pointing point of view and I take that as a good sign.

I am accustomed to saying that people who harbor unreasonable prejudices against black people in the U. S. are racists and are to be deplored. I don’t want to go away from that as an importnat premise, but today, I don’t want to start there. I want to start here. (You will see this paragraph again at the end of the argument)

Many of the U.S. counties that moved toward Trump in 2016 and 2020 experienced long-run adverse economic conditions that began with the 2000 entry of China into the World Trade Organization, setbacks that continue to plague those regions decades later.


But even before that, there was NAFTA, which hardly needs to be spelled out anymore, but which is the North American Free Trade Agreement. Here is the citation and the conclusion from Edsall’s article.
“In “Local Economic and Political Effects of Trade Deals: Evidence from NAFTA,” Jiwon Choi and Ilyana Kuziemko, both of Princeton, Ebonya Washington of Yale and Gavin Wright of Stanford make the case that the enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993 played a crucial role in pushing working class whites out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party:


“We demonstrate that counties whose 1990 employment depended on industries vulnerable to NAFTA suffered large and persistent employment losses relative to other counties. These losses begin in the mid-1990s and are only modestly offset by transfer programs. While exposed counties historically voted Democratic, in the mid-1990s they turn away from the party of the president (Bill Clinton) who ushered in the agreement and by 2000 vote majority Republican in House elections”.

What do these changes mean? Here are three things they mean. David Autor and his colleagues specifically cite:


“an ideological realignment in trade-exposed local labor markets that commences prior to the divisive 2016 U.S. presidential election.” More specifically, “ trade-impacted commuting zones or districts saw: a) an increasing market share for the Fox News Channel, b) stronger ideological polarization in campaign contributions and c) a relative rise in the likelihood of electing a Republican to Congress.”
So there is the structure of the problem as I am trying it on today. The internationalization of trade (as opposed to protectionism) hit a certain segment of the U. S. population very hard. Autor et. al. call these “trade-impacted…districts.”

It not only reduced their incomes; it reduced their prospects. Thus, according to Katherine Russ et. al.,

“…trade induced economic downturns “affect entire communities, as places with the lowest fractions of high-school or college-educated workers are finding themselves falling with increasing persistence into the set of counties with the highest unemployment rates.”


So here’s where they are:
“Eroded social standing, the loss of quality jobs, falling income and cultural marginalization have turned non-college white Americans into an ideal recruiting pool for Donald Trump — and stimulated the adoption of more authoritarian, anti-immigrant and anti-democratic policies.”

And not only that, but:

“Lea Hartwich, a social psychologist at the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies at Osnabrueck University in Germany wrote in an email:


“Those falling behind face a serious threat to their self-worth and well-being: Not only are the societal markers of personal worth and status becoming unattainable but, according to the dominant cultural narrative of individual responsibility, this is supposedly the result of their own lack of hard work or merit.”

So the “societal markers” of personal worth and status are severely eroded and, even worse, according to the dominant cultural narrative of individual responsibility—which they themselves insist on—all this is their fault.


Finding Scapegoats.


So let’s review. This identifiable group of voters has had a really rough time since and because of the internationalization of trade. They have lost income and status and both those trends appear to be continuing for the foreseeable future. The group that has benefitted from these changes has made alliances with the groups these voters are accustomed to feeling superior to, so our losses are not only absolute, but also comparative losses.


These voters need someone to blame in the very worst way. Changing the issues defining our situation from economic to cultural seems like a good move. That means that the class that is benefitting from these changes and their “projects,” the people we have always thought of as below us, cannot be opposed in economic terms but there are lots of cultural terms available.


The effect of this culture war will be to ridicule the rising class above us, the managerial class, and to deplore the class below us, the even poorer whites, and the darker hued minority groups. Programs like Affirmative Action are perfect for that purpose because they are race-based systems of preference. The Black Lives Matter protests that keep getting out of hand are nearly ideal and, combined with Defund they Police, they are entirely ideal. The schools where these voters send their children are a hotbed of left-wing ideology.


And so on. These are Fox News watchers, if you remember the reference from David Autor and his colleagues, so justifications of these grievances are ready to hand and I have used some of the language here.


What should such a person do?


Here is where I started, you will recall.


“I am accustomed to saying that people who harbor unreasonable prejudices against black people in the U. S. are racists and are to be deplored. I don’t want to leave that as a valued premise, but today, I don’t want to start there. I want to start here.”

I started with changes in international trade and found up with “unreasonable prejudices against black people.” These easily visible prejudices are now seen as the last step in a long line of steps, none of which have been their choice. They can’t change the shift toward international trade and the skills that fit best with it. I can’t—“I” in that sentence is used to refer to the group of people who have been disadvantaged by the shift—acquire those skills myself and even if I could, the number of such jobs being shifted from human beings to robots will continue to grow. The groups below me are receiving unfair help from the groups above me and they are claiming these advantages as their right. The anger I quite naturally feel because I am ridiculed by those above me and reviled by those below me, needs to find an outlet of some sort.

The Republican party is cueing up a list of causes I can legitimately be angry about. They are offering me leadership that supports and frames my grievances as public policies. What have you got to offer me that can compete with that?

Some will say, of course, that I ought not to pursue my own welfare, but the welfare of the country, but that’s not what anyone else is doing. Every group I have named is out for personal benefits, whether moral credit or economic advantage, so I don’t think I ought to be the only one foregoing personal benefits of “the greater social good.”

What else have you got?

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Staying in Love

Posted on February 7, 2022 by hessd

I am going to argue today that it is possible and that for a certain kind of person—I am that kind of person—it is a really good idea. Now, during what my wife, Bette, and I call “the Valentine season” seems like a good time to try out the argument.

I will argue that it is not easy to stay in love, but first I would like to argue that it is hard to give a clear meaning to the phrase. That being the case, I would like to spend some time on what I do not want to convey by using it.

I don’t mean staying infatuated. I know from experience that the period of infatuation feels absolutely terrific. I know it doesn’t last all that long. I know that trying to get it to last longer than it should will fail and will feel bad. I know that making binding decisions under its influence is short-sighted at best. And I knew all that before I learned that the Latin at the heart of “infatuated,” was fatuus, which means “foolish.”

I don’t mean staying in lust. Nothing against lust. It is a wonderful component in a much more complex and satisfying relationship. It is virtually a language of its own. But it isn’t the whole relationship and when it is treated as if it were, it distorts other parts of the relationship, some of which are a good deal more important over the long haul. My idea of the ideal arc of married lust is that you are consumed by it, then you perform it confidently, then you remember it fondly together.

I don’t mean just “not violating” the real promises on which the relationship is based. I do mean really fulfilling, as opposed to just “not violating,” the promises on which the relationship is based, but that is a much more difficult idea. There are the formal promises, like the ones in the marriage ceremony. I am a fan of those promises [1] but there are other, crucially important but usually unarticulated, promises, which are at the heart. I discover only gradually what those promises were. I may learn how to say what they were before my wife does, but she knew them first. She knew when those promises were being kept and when they were not. For me, “really fulfilling” those promises requires that I know what they are—I know that is not true of everybody—and if she can’t tell me, I need to learn in all the other ways I learn.

And finally, I don’t mean simply doing the things that love requires. Loving anyone—this is much broader than the romantic mode—means wishing him or her well; it means doing what you can to support the hopes or, when necessary, to share the griefs. I came eventually to love my parents that way. I love my brothers that way. I love my kids that way.

When I talk about “staying in love,” I am talking about the kind of feeling that helps me do those things. It is fuel for the relationship; it isn’t the goal of the relationship. But it also feels really good.

Elements of Staying in Love

You might not have noticed, but in the last few paragraphs, some major distinctions were made. Here are two. When I talk about “being in love,” I am talking about emotions, not intentions. When I talk about those feelings as fuel, I distinguish what works as fuel for me from what might work as fuel for someone else.

That means that it is the function that unites the whole category and it is the particulars that have the desired effect on the lovers. And it is the particulars I know most about. Take this picture for instance. This was taken on our first actual date—the one after the introductory coffee at Starbucks. We had seen a movie and were wandering around the mall. I asked if she would mind if I took some pictures. She was fine with that. [2] This is the picture I wanted, but I was having a lot of trouble describing how I wanted her to pose for it. Where are the elbows, where are the hands, etc. She said, “I see what you’re getting at,” and put herself like this. This is exactly what I had in mind, but she got there by imaging what I might have wanted. I still get a lift out of that.

There is a lot of celebration of independence for women these days and very little celebration for marriage. And marriage, a good one anyway, is an interdependence tailored to the personalities of the partners. So she has devised a way to “perform” dependence now and then as a favor. These are the little gestures that used to be thought of as “good manners” and which, after a period of being vilified, [3]are now mostly ignored. We still do them because they still enact the “being in love” part of the relationship and in that way, they fuel all the other parts.

It might well be—I haven’t asked her—that she would prefer to do them herself, but that she offers me the chance to do them “for her” because she knows how it affects me. (I’m talking about seemingly inconsequential things like holding doors and seating her at a table.) If that is true, then pretending that I am doing it for her actually accomplishes doing it for us. The gift of these little performed courtesies is generous, assuming that they are done more for me than for her, and they are smart, too, because they fuel the relationship that is so important to us both.

One final example. Early in our relationship she asked me to read a book called The 5 Love Languages. I didn’t like it much on first glance, but eventually it occurred to me that if I could find out how she “hears” my love for her, I could speak it in the language she hears best. In all candor, I prefer to offer expressions of love in the language I like best. Who wouldn’t? But if these expressions are going to fuel the relationship, they are going to have to be heard and understood, so “what they are for” has to take priority over “the form I like best.”

For reasons that still baffle me, Bette “hears” love in what the book calls “acts of service.” Remember, as you mull this, that my helping her on with her coat is not a service to her. Her receiving it gracefully and with attention is an act of service to me. So what counts as acts of service to her? You wouldn’t believe it. It is things like keeping the table from always being a clutter of books and papers; it is like taking the garbage out; it is things like getting the dishes off the counter and into the dishwasher and then out of the dishwasher and into the cupboards.

It took me a little while, I confess, to get over the idea that doing all these chores were a way of earning expressions of love. I wouldn’t like them at all if I thought of they as buying something. I thought for a little while of old Laban switching brides on Jacob and then extorting another seven years of chores out of him so he could get the one he had actually chosen. That’s not the best part of the Jacob Cycle.

But eventually, it occurred to me that the gift is seeing “what needs to be done” the way Bette sees it. It is, in fact, exactly like her posing for the picture at the mall. She understood the picture I had in my mind and did that even when I couldn’t describe it. All these chores are just my understanding the picture she has in her mind and doing what I can to make it happen.

Am I right about that? Of course. It fuels “being in love” feelings in Bette which act as the fuel for the marriage. The marriage isn’t about the fuel. It’s about the destination (and also the journey, for those of you who are destination-phobic) but the relationship between having enough of the right kind of fuel and actually getting where you are trying to go—that relationship ought to be clear to everyone.

And finally, it is getting clear to me.

[1] My wife, Marilyn, was sick a long time before she died. We went through a lot of difficult things together and every now and then, she would say, “Do you remember that ‘in sickness and in health’ part of the vows? I think this is what they were there for.” She said it with a smile and she was right.
[2] Unlike a much earlier date, who responded to the idea as if I might want to post it on a Lost and Found bulletin board or at the Post Office.
[3] About a man holding a door for a woman, for instance, I remember the title of a paper given at a sociology conference: “The Hand That Holds the Doorknob Rules the World.” Pretty vivid, don’t you think?

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The Stupidity of Intellectuals

Posted on February 3, 2022 by hessd

I’m going to say a lot of bad things about intellectuals today so I might just as well take the trouble to identify myself as one right up front. I have had a lot of formal education and have spent more time teaching undergraduates than I have spent doing anything else since 1966. If I were going to have to make the case that I have contributed significantly to the academic consideration of some crucial issue or other, I would have to adopt a much higher standard. Also, I would fail to meet it. But the purpose of calling myself an “intellectual” today is just the share the blame implicit in the accusation I am going to make today.

So let’s start here. “Hi. My name is Dale. I’m an intellectual.”

This line of thought began innocently enough when Paul Krugman reported on Florida’s Senate Bill 148, which, as passed out by the committee, forbade the teaching of certain “divisive concepts.” Krugman added some examples, such as specifying the age of certain rocks as older than the best known biblical accounts would allow them to be.

My favorite “divisive concept” is the well-known conflict about whether Bud Lite ought to be drunk because it is less filling or because it tastes great. In the ads that featured this faux conflict, proponents prepare for, and in at least one one ad, engage in, physical conflict against “the other team.” The other team prefers the same beer, but for a different reason. Right.

Making “divisive concepts” illegal and the teaching of them a matter for prosecution is ridiculous. As an intellectual, I cite all the reasons why such an idea cannot really be taken seriously and then I retire, having done “the job.” That’s not stupid, but it is naive. Let me tell you why.

The Florida bill has nothing at all to do with “divisive concepts” like racial guilt or the legacy of exploitation of native peoples. The Florida bill is an attempt to change the subject from race or imperialism—as above—to how to prosecute unpopular ideas. We have apparently come a long was from Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’ “freedom for the thought we hate” (1929). [1] A concept is used; some people take exception to it. It is (clearly) divisive. Now, in Florida, if this bill becomes law, the curriculum that contained such a concept may be changed and the professor who made use of it may be prosecuted.

The question that is answered by SB 148, therefore, is this: “How can we change the debate from the evidence available to support an idea like CRT, to the political penalties that may be assessed for using it in public?” It an idea put forth by some very savvy people that the conflict should be changed from one they will certainly lose to one they will certainly win.

Consider the possibilities

So Party A and Party B have a conflict. It must be resolved one way or another. What sort of mechanism should be used to resolve it?: Let’s imagine that it should be put up for a vote. That’s one way. It could be decided by a committee I control. That’s a second way. Or, as a third way, we could have a duel. Party A is better at pistols; Party B at swords. What kind of duel should be scheduled? Or, fourth and finally, they could consult the most knowledgeable people available, experts, and see if there is better support for A’s side or B’s.

In every one of these ways of “settling” the conflict, one party or another is advantaged. “The way the conflict is to be settled” and “who will win the conflict” are just two versions of the same question. And now we see why devices like SB 148 are so powerful. They pretend to be about an intellectual issue of some kind, but they are actually about changing the mode of resolution from one kind to another.

Here’s an example from Ursula LeGuin’s The Dispossessed, the best dystopian novel I know. Shevek is the name of the principal character.

“A man named Shevet came up to Shevek one night after supper. He was a stocky, handsome follow of 30. “I’m tired of getting mixed up with you,” he said. “Call yourself something else.

The surly aggressiveness would have puzzled Shevek earlier. Now he simply responded in kind. “Change your own name if you don’t like it,” he said.

“You’re one of those little profiteers [a socialist slur on capitalists] who go to school to keep his hands clear,” the man said. “I’ve always wanted to knock the shit out of one of you.”

“Don’t call me a profiteer,” Shevek said. But this wasn’t a verbal battle….When he woke up, he was lying on his back on the dark ground between two tents.”

Shevek’s instinct, like mine, was to dispute the accuracy of the derogatory term he had been called. Shevet was, in fact, mistaken about that. Shevek was no profiteer. He was an academic, however (clean hands) and that was what Shevet resented. An argument about what criteria should be used to determine “profiteer-status” and whether they truly applied to Shevek, is the kind of thing Shevek and I would have preferred.

Shevet, however, changed the kind of fight it was and beat Shevek senseless. They saw each other again from time to time, but the statement had been made and Shevet showed no further interest in Shevek at all. He had said what he wanted to say by beating the shit out of Shevek and Shevek had found no response to it at all. [2]

Nothing I have said so far establishes the intellectuals who participate in this charade as stupid. That’s the next step. I have as my model, the dog in the movie Up, who has one goal or another in mind but who can be instantly distracted by the word “Squirrel.” He doesn’t seem to be able to help himself. Possibly the dog is an intellectual.

Intellectuals ought to be able to do better. When an idea—the home field of intellectuals—is proposed, the intellectuals are attracted to it. We want to show that it is internally inconsistent or that it will be readily abused or that it can be shown to be untrue. And we will continue to make that case all the while the issue is being resolved in other ways in other settings. While one school board after another is taken over by candidates who oppose “divisive concepts,” we intellectuals continue to point out the inherent weakness of the idea. While on professor after another is fined or demoted or fired for using “divisive concepts” in class, we intellectuals continue to write journal articles for each other establishing the fundamental flaws in the concept itself.

That’s the part that is stupid.

I don’t think we ought to ignore stupid ideas. We ought to declare them to be wrong (in any of the hundreds of ways ideas can be wrong) and then change our focus to establishing how the conflict will be resolved. If it is going to be resolved by the courts, what will it take to win there? If at the polls, what will it take to win there? If by vigilante action against elected school boards, what will it take to win there? But we should not, under any circumstances, continue to argue the intellectual flaws of an idea that is winning by every other measure.

[1] In all fairness, that ringing phrase was lodged in a minority opinion in the United Sates v. Schwimmer. I didn’t mean to imply that it has ever been more than an aspiration of intellectuals.
[2] Shevek does find, as the character develops, a way to respond. It is not definitional and it is not physical, but it does drive the rest of the plot.

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Avoiding Divisive Concepts in Our Schools

Posted on January 26, 2022 by hessd

This is so easy to snicker at and dismiss. It is ridiculous on its face. And that is why it is so dangerous. Let’s think about it. And so we will have something concrete to think about, let’s consider Florida’s Senate Bill 148. In Oregon, a bill will ordinarily have a section that says “This bill may be referred to as the _ Act.” Senate Bill 148 doesn’t give us that, which, I have to say, is tempting.

Here is Paul Krugman’s characterization of it.

I use that last word advisedly: There’s a bill advancing in the Florida Senate declaring that an individual “should not be made to feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race.” That is, the criterion for what can be taught isn’t “Is it true? Is it supported by the scholarly consensus?” but rather “Does it make certain constituencies uncomfortable?”

Paul Krugman, New York Times, January 24, 2022

But the bill does some interesting things that I think are worth examining. One is that it de-professionalizes educators. If the question at issue is not “is this supported by the scholarly consensus?” as Krugman puts it, but “is anyone offended?” then everything is changed. The students know whether they are offended. The parents know whether the student is offended. Professional accuracy is no longer a defense. Legions of “offended parents” go straight to the school board demanding the head of the offending teacher on a pike because he or she has taught a “divisive concept.”


That’s one change. What was once an inquiry by the institution about whether the teachers had maintained professional standards, is now a witch hunt conducted from the outside against a professional. If you think of the educator as part of the knowledge economy—the brain part of the work force—then all the advantages in this conflict go to the aroused parents who may very well not be part of the knowledge economy and may have a grievance against those who are. This is just another skirmish between the managerial part of the work force and the blue collar part of the workforce. It’s a familiar conflict in electoral politics, but this extends it to schools.


Is this really possible? Let’s look at two paragraphs of Senate Bill 148. I have put in bold font the heart of this wordy paragraph.


The bill specifies that subjecting any individual, as a condition of employment, membership, certification, licensing, credentialing, or passing an examination, to training, instruction, or any other required activity that espouses, promotes, advances, inculcates, or compels such individual to believe certain specified divisive concepts constitutes unlawful discrimination.

Is the age of certain rocks a divisive concept such that requiring an individual to “believe” it is unlawful discrimination? As the teacher, do I compel you to believe it when I ask you on a test what the scholarly consensus is about those rocks? When the question of “belief” is taken out of this sentence, it says that any answer is as good as any other. Find one answer to be acceptable and another not is “unlawful discrimination.”


Here is the second paragraph I had in mind from Senate Bill 148


The bill defines individual freedoms based on the fundamental truth that all individuals are equal before the law and have inalienable rights. Accordingly, the bill requires that instruction, instructional materials, and professional development in public schools be consistent with principles of individual freedom.

The previous paragraph appeared to be about curriculum. This one appears to encompass instruction as well. Instruction will be consistent with principles of individual freedom. Individual freedom to what? Am I free, let’s say, to hold that transitive verbs really don’t have to have an object? Against what notions might I appeal on the basis of my individual freedom?

So as I say, within the context of education, it sounds like silliness. But what it really does is to substitute ideological politics for professional consensus when the two conflict. At the best, it turns the schools into a war zone. At the worst, into a slaughterhouse.

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Disapproval Fatigue and Team Names

Posted on January 19, 2022 by hessd

I grew up in a meat and potatoes house. We had noodles from time to time, but we never had “pasta.” That being the case, the first dozen or so times I saw the word “antipasto, “ I misunderstood it completely. [1] Today’s reflection is going to be a little bit on the sober side. Probably pretty abstract, too. So I thought starting with the pasta might help; unless, of course, you are anti-pasta.

It will come as no surprise to anyone to hear that the United States is in the midst of a culture conflict. That means, for today’s purposes that there are different cultural norms and that the proper pursuit of the implied goals has either broad latitude or virtually none. And that means that people in Culture A are going to be disapproving of the words and actions of the people in Culture B and vice versa. There is a lot of disapproving going on.

Disapproval

I, myself, am not a big fan of being disapproved of. but today’s dilemma isn’t just that. The more it happens the more it hurts and the more resistant to it I get. I am hoping that by this stage, you are getting a little impatient and are waiting for me just to get on with it. I’m almost done.

At the beginning of the process—imagining for the moment that there could be a “beginning”—when someone criticizes me for some view I hold, I look at the view to see if I really hold it or if I should make any changes in the way I express it and so on. But later in the process, the people who are criticizing and the criticisms they are making are so familiar, that I react to them, rather than to the issue. This is the stage I call “disapproval fatigue.” It is analogous to having the same toe stepped on over and over. After a while, it just hurts more.

When I get fatigued, I don’t go back and look at the object of their criticism any more. I either move out of range or I raise the issue with them in a more focused way—essentially justifying the view they are criticizing—or I begin to attack their views. The grounds for their criticisms are weak, I say, or their way of allocating costs and benefits among the related issues is short-sighted, I say, or their criticisms are badly put and need to be refined.

Digging In

At this point in the process, I am anti- a bunch of things. I will pick three, just as illustrations. I am opposed to the racial policies that are being pushed on me. I am opposed to the description of a goal as unmixed good and therefore as justifying all kinds of actions to support it. I am opposed to the “warfare model” of partisan competition, regardless of whether it is being deployed by the other party or not. I promised three; there are three. There are more where those came from.

We are coming now to the point of this painstaking development. At this stage I am anti-this and anti-that and anti-the other thing. But, as Emil De Becque says so ardently in South Pacific, “I know what you are against. What are you for?” The pressure to be “for” something gets very strong.
You want to say, “Of course I am against that and that and that, I am an X. What would you expect?” The value of the name associated with X is crucially important. X is the answer the De Becque’s question: it is what you are for. And what you are for is the reason you are against all these other things.

That X does some valuable work for you. It gives you an answer—one answer—to the critics. There is a downside to that, but at the moment we are considering the value. It is simple and recognizable. And not only that, it gives you membership in an association of sorts. “Ah,” say the other members of this association, “You are one of us.”

Digging in has drawbacks

As you expected. Here are a few from the banquet table of drawbacks. First, it isn’t accurate. Team names—like “Neoliberal” for instance—do have the effect of grouping people together but people wind up under such an abstract banner for a lot of different reasons. So even if you have chosen it as a shelter from the storm, you have to know that it will misrepresent your views, your particular views.

The second is that you can “dig in” on procedural grounds or on substantive grounds. In the examples above, you can criticize an approach as being too radical (proponents will do anything to advance the cause) or as being wrong (the wrong goal is being pursued). I am calling that first one a procedural critique and it matters because the X name you take will be a strategic or a tactical one. You will be expected to argue that the goal should be pursued more broadly or more slowly or with more attention to side effects. X, in this case, will turn out to be translated as “moderate” or “gutless” depending on the kind of friends you have and on how early in the dispute names are called for.

If you argue that the goal itself is wrong, then you will get a goal-related name. “Patriot” and “Traitor” are goal-related names. “Perpetrator” and “Victim” are goal-related names. [2] You see where this is going.

The last lap

I have been so tempted to begin calling myself a conservative. I don’t want to do it because I don’t like my teammates. And it distorts the reasons I hold a lot of the views I do hold. And it leads people to infer, erroneously, that I must hold related views Y and Z, which I do not.

I think I am not yet at the place where I am compelled to choose among the team names. I can keep on doing what I have been doing, which is staying away from some meetings, and reading these books rather than those, and probing carefully to see if I dare have in any setting, the conversation I would like to have. As long as those work well enough and I am not overwhelmed by “disapproval fatigue,” I can keep on doing them. My formal affiliation with some team or other is postponed. I am just me being me.

I may already be, however, at the place when I really should pick a name (and therefore a team) and I might if I could find one that meant what I want it to mean. It would have to have implications for the issues I keep getting involved in (not all of them, of course) or it would not communicate automatically to the other participants what they should expect from me.

I think the recent interest in “anti-racism” is a good example. It offers a scale where “racism” is one pole and “anti-racism” is the other pole. I myself am a non-racist. There is no place on that scale for me. The argument against my position is that there is no way NOT to be on the scale: you are either for racism or against it and being “non-“ is effectively being for it. I disagree. I think that in specifying “race” as the organizing principle, you are guaranteeing an exhausting fight and one which you will lose.

Some fights really are about race. “Race” narrowly construed. But many that are said to be about race are really about either culture or about social class. And of those, some can be more effectively defined and fought if they are about culture or class than if they are about race. So let’s say each of these possibilities is available. We will call these issues “racial;” those issues “cultural;” and those other issues class-based. I think that’s just smart.

So what do you think? Am I a non-racist?

[1] It still doesn’t seem quite fair that ante + pasto migrated over to anti + pasto as if confusing non-Italians were its entire reason for being.
[2] “Marginal” and “marginalized” are goal-related names, too, although you might not think it.

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So…who IS the fairest of us all?

Posted on January 12, 2022 by hessd

I’ve been in a number of conversations recently that presume race and racism as the proper context for the discussion. It isn’t always. Sometimes it is culture; sometimes it is class; sometimes it is religious practice.

And on some of those occasions, I have said, “You know, race isn’t really the best category to use in exploring this topic.” And sometimes—fairly frequently, actually—the response has been, “No, no. Race is the right thing to talk about!” And if I say that the best topic is one that distinguishes effective childrearing practices from ineffective ones, I have sometimes been called a racist.

That doesn’t affect me as much as the accusers, inevitably friends of mine, think it will because I was brought up in a culture where “sin” was invariably relevant. There was no getting away from it. The most honorable self-control still falls under the scythe of “thought, word, and deed.” [1] So “racist” isn’t quite that moral blow my friends think it ought to be.

I have two ideas I would like to take out for a walk this morning. The first is that, as important as race is, there are other things we need to talk about, too. One way to approach the question—not the question of racism, but the question of talking about racism—is to ask when we will be done. The best answers, I think, vary with the reasons for talking about it. Here are some.

American history: Race has been a huge part of American history. I think it should be part of every school curriculum every year. I think racial guilt should not. And if you think it should, I would like for you to say what good outcome you are trying to achieve by making school children feel awful about things their great-grandmothers did. [2] I can see the teaching that “the savages” ought to be denied human dignity as a wrong teaching. I can see acts of cruelty and theft of property [3] as part of the account of American history. I can see the decisions and acts of particular individuals and groups as deserving the adjective “racist.” But in our schools and in our teaching generally, I think there ought to be a reason for teaching what we teach.

The defense I most often hear is that it ought to be taught because it is true. But that’s an awful answer. It ought not be taught if it isn’t true, but among the zillions of true things, some are relevant to the narrative and some (most) are not. And narratives themselves are not true or false, but rather useful or not. Facts that are alleged in support of the narratives can, of course, be true or false, but the narrative itself cannot.

Social Equity: Let’s start with the idea that the economic and political system we have developed have very positive effects on people who are resource rich [I define that notion broadly enough to include having good parents] and very poor effects on people who are resource poor. As Anatole France puts it, “’The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.”

There are three kinds of reasons commonly given in support of social equity—“equity” remember means “fairness” not necessarily equality. The achievement of social equity will need to have some way to deal with those disadvantages that are principally caused by racial discrimination, but racial equality and social equity aren’t the same kinds of things at all. The first of the reasons is that it—achieving a fair society—is the right thing to do. I think that is important for many kinds of reasons, but it is not, by itself, going to solve the problem.

Another kind of reason is that social equity is cheaper. When a population is treated fairly and believes it is being treated fairly, governing them is not at all expensive. Frances Fukuyama, writing about trust, says that in low trust societies, there is a tax levied on every human transaction. That’s why inegalitarian and authoritarian societies are so expensive. It is a commonplace to say that if we spent more money on schools, we wouldn’t have to spend so much on jails. I have some quibbles about that, mostly having to do with measurement, but the idea that prevention is cheaper than treatment ought to be relatively uncontroversial.

Although you wouldn’t necessarily presume it, it is true that having a small favored population to whom the best of the society flows means that you have to do something to keep those goods and services from the large disfavored population. Keeping the good schools separate from the poor schools and the good neighborhoods separate from the poor ones requires monitoring and enforcement. It requires laws and regulations and inspectors and punitive sanctions and somebody has to pay for all that. In a lot of cases, exclusion just costs more than inclusion.

This is not an argument for inclusion, please remember, on the grounds that it is right. This argument is based on how much less expensive it is.

Third, social equity gives us the kind of society we would genuinely prefer to live in. This argument doesn’t take the route of arguing how best to achieve it, only that it is the common preference. An equitable society is not one where there are no losers; it is one where the losers are where they are because of their choices. [4] Winners and losers are not toxic categories in an equitable society, particularly if it is a snapshot taken today rather than a fate forced in the long run onto whole populations. It is also a help if “being a loser” is not a disaster. A society that helps its losers gives them a chance to not always be losers.

This is really the simplest of the arguments. A society where you can live freely only when the walls are high and the gates are locked is not a good place. A society where you are allowed to go wherever you want provided you are willing to step over the bodies on the sidewalk or fend off the mendicants is not a good place. People would choose something better than that if given the chance.

In the paragraphs above, I have argued that you can say a lot of important things about equity without ever introducing the effects of our racial history. But now I would like to talk about race and especially about racial stereotypes. This isn’t “race” the way biologists look at it. These are the different flavors of “them” that show up in conversations that get out of hand.

I hear that there is increasing concern that “whites” are going to become a minority in this country. That’s where the demographers see the trends to be headed. I think it is worth asking, “minority of what?” Any answer to that will be required to invent the category of “non-whites” and to treat it as if it were a coherent cultural or political entity. You would have to be willing to say things like: this is how nonwhites think, this is how they relate to each other, this is how they vote, and this is why. Those are ridiculous because they require attributing commonalities to a population that actually have in common only that they don’t look like you. That’s not common enough to say sensible things. “Non-white” in this formulation is only another way of saying “them.”

Let’s start at another place and wrap this exploration up. Using “race” as described above, it is reasonable to say that every “race” has characteristics—things they characteristically prefer, things they are normally good at or poor at, patterns of childrearing. “Characteristically,” I said. Now let’s imagine a circle of chairs on a stage. In each chair is a representative of each “race.” The question the moderator asks is this: what characteristic of your “race” are you proudest of?”

There ought to be something to say no matter what group you are representing. It doesn’t sound that hard. But when we get the the white representative—you see now why I started with the fantasy about the majority of minorities—what will the white person say? Whatever it is, it will be called “racist” by nearly all the people I know. Good things about white people are “racism.” End of discussion.

I have three criticisms to make of that sorry state of affairs. The first is that it is silly. The second is that it is patently unfair. The third is that it will not help us get to where we want to be.

There is a lot of talk today about “anti-racism.” That’s my position. I think race should be the focal point when it helps us all move in the direction we want to go. Where there are other concepts that are more helpful, let’s use those.

[1] One of my favorite Whoopi Goldberg lines comes from early in her career. As she relates it, someone said the was a sinner. “No, no, she said, I’m a surfer.” As if she was talking about one pronunciation or another and the accuser’s misunderstanding was completely benign.
[2] Probably it was their great-grandfathers, but I am grandfathering the current gender equity discussion into the old racial guilt discussion.
[3] Complicated without a common definition of what constitutes “property” but we could have gotten over that if we had really wanted to.
[4] It is not hard to think of exceptions, like people who were born with debilitating mental or physical handicaps. I grant them as exceptions to the general rule and ask that you do that too.

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Staying Protected Against “Them”

Posted on January 4, 2022 by hessd

I want to express a guarded admiration for “them.” Before I do that, I will need to say just who I mean by “them” and also to suggest that the clarity of that designation is becoming a little ragged around the edges. I will give some examples and hope you get the idea.


The first stop is the Fox News slogan, “We report; you decide.” I think that is a disastrously bad standard for a respected news station to choose. [1] At the same time, I can see how it would be received favorably by any group of consumers, particularly a group that feels itself being deprived of the right to make decisions. In public relations, you really can’t go wrong by appearing to lodge the decisive power in the hands of another group; the other group seems always to appreciate the vote of confidence.


Another way of putting that slogan is, “We are not very good at telling you what is really news and what is not.” Or possibly, “Don’t think of us as knowledgeable reporters; think of us as a bulletin board, where you yourself can choose what is worth your attention.”


FOX news has been the choice of Republicans for a long time. But as the the Republican party has been becoming more and more populist—and less clearly conservative—it is harder to identify “them.” Are we talking about conservatives or are we talking about populists? Or some other group? Each group would like to be able to decide just what “the news” is, but, for different reasons.


At that point, I would like to introduce today’s entry. Daniela J. Lamas wrote an opinion column in the New York Times today called “When Faced With Death, People Often Change Their Minds.” It is an article well worth reading whether you wind up agreeing with the premise or not and you can see it here.


But it isn’t that issue that attracted my attention. Instead, it was the younger brother of “We report, you decide.” It is D.Y.O.R—“do your own research.” Obviously, that is sound advice in some circumstances, but it is easy to see how it can support simple denial or even conspiratorial thinking, given the segmentation of knowledge sources. Here is an example:


“Two days after getting the jab, a friend of mine’s friend had a heart attack,” a Reddit user wrote recently in a discussion about Covid-19 vaccines. “I’m not saying they’re connected, but D.Y.O.R.”


Let’s see now. What would the research topic be? The correlation between heart attacks and vaccination? The government plot to kill credulous citizens? And where would you look? The annals of the American Medical Association? QAnon for Everybody?


You see the problem.


Also, it clear that in the meantime—you know, while the “research” is being conducted—no one should be vaccinated because, of the likelihood of the resultant heart attacks. As you can hear from the tone, I am having trouble not being angry about it. And, to be honest, it isn’t only because of how stupid it is, it is because of how effective it is.


What, after all, is the alternative to DYOR? Trusting someone who has been trained to distinguish realistic risk from fanatical fright-mongering? We can’t have that. That would lead to trusting “them.” And the thing we know about “them” is that they are not like “us.”


So “them” as marked out in these examples doesn’t seem to come down to Republicans or to conservatives or to more exotic categories like “white males without college degrees.” It seem that “them” refers to people who are systematically alienated from the professional infrastructure of the society. So if you have mastered an academic discipline of some sort—say economics, psychology, geology, biology—you are “them” and are no longer trustworthy.


Such people are allied to the gummint (Ronald Reagan’s pronunciation, which is just perfect for this use) and are therefore the enemy. Fortunately, you have an alternative to relying on such people. You can go to the internet and, you know, DYOR.


[1] An organization that wants to be respected for the quality and reliability of its journalism, rather than for just for being loyal.

 

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And be sure to look both ways

Posted on December 31, 2021 by hessd

Yes, well, easier said than done. I caught myself cheating this morning and this was just as I was backing out of my parking spot. This is the way it happens with me, for good or ill. I catch a happening and then before I have a chance to process it fully, I see it as an instance of a class of happenings. “Oh,” I said to myself, “I do this all the time. I just happened to notice this time.”

In this post, I would like to explore what “this” is. I am hoping it sounds familiar. My highest hope is that you will say, “Oh…I do that all the time.”

By “this,” I mean to refer to a suite of behaviors. [1] “Suite” means that they happen together. Cuing one behavior very often cues the whole suite. And that’s really why this matters at all. As I was backing out of my parking slot this morning, some part of me was aware that I should “look both ways.” So I leaned forward—that’s what you have to do to look both ways in a Prius—and turned my head to the right and then to the left. I didn’t actually see anything because I wasn’t looking.

I was performing the suite of behaviors that is, somewhere in my brain, titled “looking both ways,” but I was busy thinking about other things and didn’t pay the slightest attention to what was there to see. Having looked both ways, I looked down at the dashboard where the rear view camera’s image is displayed. I didn’t pay any attention to that either.

I did some other things, though, which I assume are part of the suite. I frowned the sort of frown that we associate with concentration. I noticed that, too. I increased my general muscle tension, which, I suppose, is consistent with readying myself to react physically to whatever I might have seen, had I been actually looking.

It is that collection of behaviors I had in mind when I said “I do this all the time.” Then, in that immediate second thought, I was persuaded of two things. First, the “look both ways” thought cues all the behaviors I named. It cues the ones that are directly associated with my goal of not running into anyone and it cues all the others which have come to be associated with it. So I don’t really think the frowning helps; it’s just part of the suite.

I also suspect that there is a performance dimension to it. That thought is hard for anyone to escape who has read a lot of Irving Goffman, [2] and I often catch myself doing things that I suspect have the goal of reassuring others. You play “the totally focused shopper” or the “looking carefully both ways” especially if there is someone you want to look at and don’t want to get caught looking at them. Then there is, “I’m so engaged in this book that I didn’t notice you come in,” and a host of other things we learn to “perform” so that they scarcely seem to be other-oriented at all. They are a suite.

But what caught my attention this morning is that while I was performing this suite of behaviors, I noticed that I was paying no attention at all to what I was pretending to be looking at. I would have seen a person standing there, I suppose, but I wasn’t gauging how close I was to the back wall. I wasn’t looking to see if some item that is usually in “storage” against the east wall had drifted out into my path. I wasn’t looking. I was pretending to look. I was performing the suite.

And then, on the way to Starbucks, I got to thinking how much like the model of evolutionary traits this is. Evolution chooses the structures and behaviors that lead to successful competition for food and for mates. [3] But nothing requires evolution to go back over the suites of changes and rigorously comb out all the elements of the suite that don’t actually make a contribution. So these associated traits or structures just ride along with the ones that are making a contribution to the survival of that species. There is no evolutionary value on going back and removing the ones that actually aren’t helping. If they are associated with the traits that do help, they are “chosen” as well.

So the frown, for instance. I know I do it. I know it doesn’t help, except is the very distant instance of seeming to an onlooker to be “looking intently.” But there is really no reason to go back and make sure I don’t frown; no reason to exert myself to remove it from the suite where it has wound up. Just leave it there.

But remember to look both ways. This message has been brought to you by the god, Janus (see above), who looks both ways better than anyone. And happy new year.

[1] I know there was a time when just how “behavior” was to be defined was crucially important to psychologists. I suspect that time has passed, but in case it is not, I intend a very broad meaning so that it includes gestures and various muscle tonalities.
[2] Certainly The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life, Stigma, Asylums, and especially his essay, “On Deference and Demeanor” in The Goffman Reader.
[3] Or, in the case of the Praying Mantis, both, simultaneously.

 

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The Seduction of Joe Hawkins

Posted on December 23, 2021 by hessd

If you have been reading this blog recently, you know that I have been thinking about some of the “interpersonal” issues dealt with by the TV series Humans. [1] Joe Hawkins (Tom Goodman-Hill), frustrated and angry at what he has to put up with in running the home in the absence of his wife, Laura, throws up his hands and goes to the store and buys his family a Synth. The Synth comes in the body of what looks like a very attractive young woman (Gemma Chan) and the family names her Anita.

The presence of Anita in the Hawkins home is like a bomb going off. Laura is angry; the nerdy older daughter, Mattie, can hardly wait to reprogram her, the son, Toby, wants a free grope as soon as the occasion is presented, and Sophie, the younger daughter, is delighted to have a friend who really truly understands her. But it is Joe who is destroyed.

I know the use of the word “seduction” in the title is misleading, but it is important to the argument I want to make so I am going to go ahead and use it and be careful to explain what I mean by it. I do not mean by using it that Joe is “seduced” by Anita. He is not. The heart of the verb is based on the Latin verb duco, meaning to lead. [2] The prefix, se- contributes “aside” or “apart.” In this context we may say “astray.” What seduces Joe Hawkins?

Three things, none of which require robotic assistance. First, he and his wife are on the outs, and part of that is that they have no sex life at all. Whatever the sex with Anita felt like, the expression of his resentment toward Laura certainly felt good. It seduced him.

Second, he presumably knows how to seduce a human female. The story doesn’t cover that, but Joe is a physically attractive man with a lot of social skills, so probably he has had the experience of persuading a young female to have sex with him. Probably it didn’t take much persuading. It was not, in any case, a situation where he does something (in Anita’s case, it is reading the code words in order) and has to ask, “Is it kicking in?” Or, afterward, “How do I turn it off?” In short, the guidance system he grew up with is not there to support him.

But, third, he feels an obligation. This is the odd one. It is this idea—and the subsequent conversation with my son, Doug—that pushed me in the direction of writing this post. Once he starts down the path of seduction—of “being led astray—you have to wonder who is leading him.[3] It isn’t Anita.

Joe says “What do I do now?” and Anita says, “Anything you want.” That’s no help. She is giving him permission; he needs instruction. But nevertheless, a line has been crossed. There is now a functioning “we”—Joe and Anita—and Joe feels an obligation to play his part. He does things that, in the moment, he does not want to do, because “he ought to.” He owes it to her; he owes it to “the two of them functioning as a team.”

It is in that sense that Joe is obligated. He has created a functioning unit and he has duties, in the moment, to his “partner.”

I know it sounds odd, and I may be wrong, but I urge you to think it through before you reject it. “Feeling an obligation” is something that happens to Joe. It is a genuine experience of his regardless of the object. It can be argued that since the focus of the obligation is fraudulent, that it cannot produce a sense of obligation, but if the feeling is Joe’s property, he will attach it where he has learned to attach it.

I wrote earlier of Laura’s concern that her daughters speak politely to the family robot. The older daughter, the techie, says that the robot ought not receive the dignity that belongs to a human, but her mother says that the daughters are affected by the responses they choose regardless of the object. I think she’s right.

And that is the third of Joe Hawkins’ problems. He has formed a social bond with a robot and it will take him a while to separate out the “feelings of obligation” that are inappropriate, if, indeed, he is ever able to do so. [4]

This “sex scene”—it is in quotes because all the huffing and puffing is skipped—has one more element that marks it as well conceived. When, afterwards, Joe asks, “How do I turn it off?” Anita answers “Command it!”

It is unlike anything else she says while she is with the Hawkins family. It is completely outside her vocabulary as Anita the household help. It suggests how the designers think of her vocabulary in “passionate adult woman” mode. Even the answer to how to bring the session to an end is, properly, addressed while she is still in the mode; while she is still a sex slave.

Whoever thought of that knows a lot about language.

[1] I’m going to save you the problem of deciphering the meaning of the quotation marks that would plague this essay. Many of the “persons” I will be dealing with are robots—“Synths,” in the language of the show—but they function like human persons in all the ways the plot requires, so I will just skip the quotation marks. So, Anita Hawkins, a Synth, is a person.
[2] The title Duke, meaning leader, comes from this same source.
[3] There is, by the way a whole brothel full of robots downtown (London) who know how to take any kind of initiative and one of them is Niska, a robot who was raised with Anita. Anita calls Niska her sister.
[4] This is not fundamentally different than Tom Hanks decision, just in time, not to dive into the ocean in Castaway, to “rescue” his only recent companion, a volleyball named Wilson. He clearly felt the obligation to Wilson and only the prospect of certain death helped him clarify his situation.

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