The Dilettante's Dilemma

Deciding what is the right thing to do is hard enough when it’s just individuals interacting with each other. We could call that “conspiracy” if we wanted to. Complicity is a whole different matter.

I’m going to go at this etymologically first. I know as well as you do that the origin of a word does not determine what it will come to mean, but sometimes I think it points us in the right direction.

Picture a football huddle or an intimate little knot at a cocktail party or a coffee hour. The individuals are close enough together that the breath of each mingles with the breath of the others. That’s the picture that “conspire” gives us. Their breath (spiro) mingles (com-). It helps if we think of individuals as representing themselves only. If you can picture Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin comparing notes at Yalta, you will have a good notion of “conspiracy.”

Complicity is another matter entirely. Here we are considering being “folded in” to something. The something you are being folded into can be large and complex. You might not know about it. That would not keep you from being folded into it. The verb plicare, “to fold” is the root of a lot of interesting English words.

Let’s just keep those tendencies separate and see if it helps us.

Imagine three dinner settings. In one, let’s say a recently integrated restaurant in a border state, two white couples agree to harass their black server. It’s not hard to imagine. If “blackened sole” is on the menu, it would offer an easy transition, but the insults don’t need to be witty; they could just be mean so long as they are racist and have been agreed upon by the group.

In the second setting–the same white couples–one person suggests that it might be fun to “needle” the server. They, the one who proposed it, are supported by one other person and opposed by the other two. This sets up an elementary conflict of conspiracy and complicity.

In the third, a group of five guys, who have stopped in for a beer at the bar after their bowling league, are within hearing distance of the interaction with the server, but are not privy to the conversation among the two couples.

There is no question of conspiracy here and the question of complicity is oddly distant. What to do? Why?

We are not considering what the right thing to do is. We are considering how the various actions should be understood and critiqued. What standard is to be used? In setting #1, everyone has agreed and everyone will be required to participate in the harassment. If one of the group did not, they could be criticized by the others for failing to participate in a group action that had been agreed upon.

In setting #2, some have agreed and some have not. It is perfectly appropriate for those who did not agree to intervene in the actions of those who did and to ask them to stop. There is a lot of play in just how that request can be put. It can be a reproof; it can be an appeal; it can be an effective change of subject. Should the objection itself become the subject at the table–I can nearly guarantee that it will–it will take some form of “Who do you think you are, criticizing the behavior I have chosen!” The answer–I can nearly guarantee it–will be “I am part of this group and I do not want to be part of the behavior you have chosen.”

This is complicated enough imagining that everyone is sober. If it is late in the meal and some are sober and some are not, it becomes more difficult.

But now we come to setting #3, the guys who just stopped in for a beer. They overhear the harassment and have a quick conversation among themselves about what to do. Let me pause briefly to say again that I am not considering in this post, what would be good behavior. I am trying to think about on what grounds behavior could be criticized or defended. I have suggested that settings #1 and #2 involve questions of conspiracy. I want to say now that setting #3 involves complicity.

The guys in the third group will have to say something like this. “I know that we are not a part of that table of couples, but what they are doing is wrong and we should say something.” And someone else would say, “What they are doing is a shame, certainly, but it does not involve us. Let’s just leave.” [1]

The normative question that faces the guys in setting #3 is whether they are required to do something about the behavior of their neighbors. In the social setting such that they are folded into it? Are they folded in because they have heard what was said? Is it because they are acquaintances of those people? The people in setting #3 would surely not make the case about a similar situation that was going on in a restaurant across the street. They would hear about that event the next day if they heard about it at all and they would look at each other and say, “What a shame!”

Just one more step toward questions of complicity. You live in Springfield, Ohio, where, according to J. D. Vance, hordes of undocumented Haitian immigrants are abducting and consuming their neighbor’s cats. You are now folded into an event that is large and ugly. You have the choice of lamenting it or counteracting it. You will probably describe one choice as better than the other.

I would. But on what grounds? Any rationale I can think of jams the accelerator to the floor and disconnects the brakes. Why is that a good idea?

[1] Or possibly, we know them in other settings–work, volunteer activities, book groups–and what we do here will have implications there. Is it worth it? Maybe a quiet word in private would be better than a scene in a restaurant.

I was reading innocently along. I’ve been interested in school funding since the 1980s when I worked for an education planning agency in Oregon. I know how complicated it is; I know there are no perfect answers.

Even so, the alarm bells went off when I read this paragraph in an October 11 piece by Troy Closson in the New York Times.

“The new system has raised ethical questions. Is it fair, for example, for a girl with the same academic and behavioral troubles as a male classmate to be classified at lower risk, simply because girls overall tend to have better outcomes than boys?”

Here’s what the reference to “the new system” means. An AI program provided by a company called Infinite Campus combs through a huge amount of data [1] about students and calculates which are most likely to graduate without additional help and which will need more help—the “help” comes in the form of additional state funding.

As you would expect, the goal of the program is to used state money efficiently. Nothing wrong with efficiency, certainly. But the paragraph that startled me places efficiency and equity as potentially opposing values. Did Nevada really hire an AI program to determine the most equitable distribution of state funds? I’m quite sure they did not.

And how, exactly, would you determine equity in the context of gender? Is it fair, the cited paragraph asks, to spend less money on girls on the grounds that they are more likely than boys to graduate from high school.Well, let’s see. You could ask a program to propose a program that allowed equal numbers of boys and girls to graduate from high school. The algorithm would be inexact, but the goal would be clear. Is that—equal graduation rates by gender—what Nevada is trying to achieve? Certainly not.

This is a triage problem. If there were a catastrophic explosion with hundreds of victims and if the girls affected by the explosion were more likely to recover than the boys, would you give more medical attention to the boys? Of course you would. Is that fair? Nope? Does it save lives? Yup.

Now what?

I know there is no answer to this dilemma. You cannot simultaneously optimize efficiency and fairness. You can choose one or the other or you can try to balance one with the other, but you cannot optimize both. And, if you are a state school funding system, you also cannot say candidly what you are doing.

[1] According to the Times article, “It weighed dozens of factors besides income to decide whether a student might fall behind in school, including how often they attended class and the language spoken at home.”

There is a lot of day to go, but as I write this at 6:30 a.m., I feel that it has already been a success. Not an achievement, mind, but a day with rich satisfactions. Those wonderful feelings and the upbeat feelings about the rest of the day come from this paragraph, which is part of a column in yesterday morning’s New York Times by Princeton professor Robert P. George.

He is, according to his assessment in this column, a well-known conservative on a very liberal campus. Conservative students who feel they have been mistreated by various collections of liberals on the campus, come to him with their complaints. A good deal of the column is his advice to them. The rest of the column describes his notion of what a liberal arts education is all about and how he plays his part in that larger drama.

Here is the paragraph

Grievance identitarianism — be it of the left or the right — impedes the very thing a student is attending university to do: namely, think and learn. It turns a person into a tribalist, someone who, rather than thinking for oneself, outsources one’s thinking to the group.

First, I have never heard the term “grievance identitarianism” (hereafter, GI) before and I embrace it fully. To me, it means something like this: I have grievances and they are so central to me that I have organized my self system around them. There is a difference, as C. S. Lewis noted in his The Great Divorce between grumbling and being nothing more than a Grumble. I think that is what “grievance identitarianism” means to Professor George.

And I think, further, that it does what he says it does. As I see it, Professor George makes three conclusions in that paragraph. The first is that GI it impedes thinking and learning. Of course it does. A grievance is a support-seeking missile. If a finding is about the right topic and if it provides support for the issue to which you have attached your grievance, then it is golden and is to be embraced without restraint.

Notice that there are two tests there. The first is the test of salience. If my grievance has to do with social class, for instance, and the data on offer have to do with race, I just keep walking. I don’t reject it; I am just not interested. I am searching for information that will support what I am angry about; I just don’t care about the other stuff. The second is the test of effect. Given that it is relevant, does it support the case my grievance requires/allows me to make?

Notice that neither of these tests supports open inquiry, much less disinterested learning. When Professor George writes the best pro-life argument he can and then assigns the best pro-choice (anti-life?) argument he can find, he is promoting open inquiry. The students will feel it is a burden to have to read both. Even at Princeton.

The second of Professor George’s conclusions is that GI turns the student into a tribalist. What he means by that is that he “outsources his thinking to the group.” “Tribalist” means a good deal more to me than that, so I am going to treat this as two effects, rather than one, as the column does. There are three potential benefits to tribalism. The first is that the other members of your tribe believe in the same thought structures you do; their world has done them wrong, just as yours has.

The second is that there is a great deal of emotional support from the tribe. It isn’t just that they have the same views; they also have the same emotions about those views. We deeply resent this and wholly support that and are sure we are being disrespected by our opponents. The third is that when there is work that needs to be done—projects that are directly implied by our shared grievance, there are colleagues to do that work with.

What I am calling the third effect is that a GI “outsources his thinking to the group.” By that, I mean more than having access to people who will agree with my beliefs and my feelings. I mean that these people, my fellow grievants, are the source my my thinking. They provide from one time to another, the data I count on; the cause and effect logic by which I connect one issue to another; and the actions that are clearly implicated. It is not that I could not have come to those conclusions by myself; it is, rather, that I never have to. My philosophy is right there on the tribe’s library shelf. It’s all plug and play for me.

Professor George is lamenting the prospect of teaching students whose attention is so directed and whose emotional commitments are so volatile. I sympathize. Thinking carefully and drawing tentative conclusions is an acquired taste. But the university is where those tastes are supposed to be acquired. It is hard to think where else it could happen and if it is going to become a habit of mind, it is going to have to start early and it is going to have to be confirmed by friends and enemies.

I mean, here, only to celebrate the expression “grievance identitarianism” and to offer Professor George my thanks for doing the work he does. All of us benefit from that work, even those who oppose the conclusions he draws.

I have resisted the word “pronatalism” for quite a while now. On behalf of the clarity of the language will all use and on behalf of all the people who want to talk reasonably about political issues, I am leery of words that don’t have natural opposing terms. No one is “anti-choice,” for instance; or “anti-life” and that makes their common opposites unhelpful.

That is the way I have been thinking of “pronatalism” until this morning, when I read this sentence in Victor Kumar’s column in the New York Times.

“But right-wing packaging should not obscure the genuine perils to which pronatalism is a response.”

For me, there is a lot to like about this sentence. First, it distinguishes the condition to which some people response with policies that are called pronatalism. What conditions are we talking about? Second, Kumar distinguishes between the response to these conditions and the “packaging” of the response. It is not hard to imagine that the response might be perfectly valid even if the “packaging” is unfortunate. Furthermore—second and a half—it is a very common experience to be in conversations in which everyone has stopped at the packaging level and no one is dealing with the condition.

That’s quite a lot to like.

The condition Kumar is dealing with is depopulation. It is a substantial problem for reasons he deals with in his column, but his point is that right wing politicians have taken over the issue and “packaged” it in ways that are consistent with their own ideology. This packaging has made the issue so distasteful to progressives that they have simply left it alone.

Not only that, but quite a number of liberal western nations in Europe are adopting measures to deal with this issue and are finding very little success. The exception seems to be France, for reasons that are worth paying attention to. France has adopted, according to Kumar, “national policies that provide parents with financial benefits like tax breaks that scale up with the number of children in a family.”

It is not hard to ridicule such a policy as “paying people to have children.” My own inclination is to make having children a more attractive prospect and I say that with no idea at all how to do it. But if young people are foregoing children because of the economic penalties associated with it, it does seem reasonable to reduce the penalties so that those who want children will choose to have them.

Ridiculing the policy as “paying people to have children” is an excellent example of “responding to the packaging” and paying no attention at all to the underlying issue. The fact that it was my own first response is sobering.

Politics in the United States is never what you think it is going to be. It is a system put together out of the remnants of half a dozen yard sales. It is made up of completely weird compromises between two positions, each plausible, but not acceptable for some reason. Oddly, it turns out that it fits us pretty well.

We seem to have been able to survive the maldistribution of electoral votes. There are active urban majorities and the rural minorities serve as a kind of cultural safety net.

So far, we have been able to survive the ideological integrity of our major political parties. Who would have thought it? The balance of each party—largely demographic—came at the cost of unconscionable compromises within each party. Our liberals sacrificed their principles to show our good faith to our conservatives and thereby keep our party electorally competitive. And so did yours.

But the parties traded their junior partners like NFL teams trading draft picks and we came up with parties that had ideological integrity; coherence. At least for a little while. A bunch of liberal (ish) Democrats over here; a bunch of conservative (ish) Republicans over there. A small crowd of Undecideds and None-of-the-Aboves in the middle.

But the party system that amazed us all by being strong enough to want very different things so long as all the wants were positive, turned out not to be strong enough to contain hatred. When no goal my party has is as strong as my wish to see the other party destroyed, we have reached the outer limits of our fabled political resiliency.

Robert Reich has captured this in his retelling of an old Russian story. Two peasants had been neighbors and poor for a long time. Then one had a stroke of good fortune and was able to buy a cow. A whole new economic future awaited him. The other neighbor prayed urgently to God to save him and meet his needs and God appeared and said He would do whatever the poor peasant asked. The peasant’s choice? “I want my neighbor’s cow to die.”

As a kind of democracy—imperiled, but not yet disowned—we stand at a point where we must ask for what we truly want. We have luxuriated for so long now in what we do not want that it will be a strenuous test.

It is sobering to remember that one of Hitler’s best used tools was reviling the liberal democratic government of Germany. In the early years, when Hitler could not credibly promise the volk of Germany anything to make their lives better, he offered them hatred of the Weimar Republic and he offered himself as the personification of their hatred. Had the Germans of the 1930’s kept the strength to bend their efforts toward what they wanted Germany to be, their future would have been much different from what it actually became.

And I think that can be said now of us. Whatever work and sacrifice we are called on to endure, if it is in order that we may achieve something we truly desire rather than simply to vent our hatred on those who want something else, I think we can achieve it.

President Biden announced today that he was going to “step down” as a candidate for the presidency in the 2024 elections. He named Vice President Kamala Harris as his choice for candidate of the Democratic party. We’ll see. The Democratic party should choose who its candidate will be, however much they love Joe Biden. And however fully he has earned their love, he has not earned their voice. Only one of the candidates for president has openly said that he, alone, is the voice of the whole party. It is not Joe Biden.

I hope the Democratic party chooses Kamala Harris as their nominee. I hope just as ardently that they do not cede this decision to their elder statesman as his price for having stepped down. That is too high a price.

The quadrennial yard sale will pick up its signs any hour now. Many things will go back to normal. The U. S. political system, cobbled together out of historical scraps, will have another chance to work.

We should know soon.

I have long come to terms with the idea that my life is not going to last forever.  I have not given any thought until today to the idea that my marriage is not going to last forever either.  That doesn’t mean, of course, that I thought it would; I just never thought about it at all.

In my running years, I ran a lot of road races; 10K mostly.  I ran enough of them to notice the point in the run when I stopped thinking about carefully saving enough resources to finish the race (very conservative) and began to think about using up the resources I still had by the time I crossed the finish line (very radical) [1]  So there have been, active in how I think and how I feel, the conservative maintenance of resources for the early phase and the radical spending of resources in the later phase.

So…for a happy marriage, when is “the later phase?”

I have always imagined without actually thinking about it that my marriage to Bette would end when one or the other of us died.  But that is like thinking that the race is over when you die.  What happened to that later phase where you wonder just why you are saving resources that could be spent to improve your performance in the race? You want to have a time to be proud of, don’t you?

So now I am thinking about it.  Bette and I are old.  Granted, I am a good deal older than she is, but, in all fairness, we are both old.  The marriage—which we count from the first date, not from the exchange of vows—will be 20 years old this coming January.  If I am not in the “later stage of the race” now, when on earth will I be?  And if the behavioral consequences of that category—use it now!—are to be put to any good use, when is that little light going to come on or that little bell ring that will signal that it is time to change tactics?

That is what is at stake in the seemingly innocuous idea that occurred to me this morning.

So imagine that for some reason you need for a visitor to conclude that you have a fantastic marriage.  If you have watched the range of TV shows I have, you will have no trouble coming up with a fantasy episode in which there will be a visitor for…say…a week and you need for the visitor to leave thinking that the two of you have the best marriage ever seen.  That’s the goal.

Now imagine what you would do to create that impression.  After all, it’s only for a week.  And there is no need to create impressions that are false.  You just need to shift over from the cast of mind in which you stop “ thinking about carefully saving enough resources to finish the race (very conservative)” and change to a cast of mind in which you “began to think about using up the resources [you still have] by the time [you]  cross the finish line (very radical). That change of awareness ought to do the trick.

See how that works.  The marriages I see where I live and the way I see my own marriage most of the time, is under the “save the resources” model.  The investments in the marriage need to be…oh…”sustainable.”  That makes a great deal of sense under the conditions that I called, above, “conservative.”  But this fantasy of trying to impress someone who is here for a week is like the finish line scenario.  Clearly, the things you want to do to impress this someone are not “sustainable.”  Are they?  On the other hand, the finish line is looming—or in the realistic case of our lives the finish line “might always be looming”—then sustainability is the wrong criterion.  “Use it all” and “what were you saving it for?” are much more appropriate.

As I finish this little thought experiment, I have no concrete ideas about what moving to “unsustainable” levels of investment in my marriage would look like.  They would require considerable information about what the marriage was really like.  They would require a clear commitment to honor the self you know yourself to be.  Still, you don’t have to do it forever.  Just until one of you dies.  

Cool, huh?

[1]  There is, of course, no reason why you should want to be exhausted at the finish line.  On the other hand, I never found a reason why I should hoard resources that will replenish themselves almost immediately, given adequate hydration and rest.  Might as well use it all, I thought.

I have a word I would like to share with New York Times columnist Pamela Paul. The word is “monolatry.” It is not as well known as “monotheism” but it is crucially necessary in Old Testament studies.

Here is a quote from Pamela Paul’s column in this morning’s New York Times:

“And when the Ten Commandments say, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me,” the implication is that there is one true god.”

“No other gods?”

The idea of monotheism is that there is one god. One God? That is certainly what the apostle Paul had in mind when he assured the sophisticates in Corinth that there was actually only one God and the others were all fakes. It is not what Moses had in mind when he passed along the tablet that says, “no other gods.”

The Moses position is that there are lots of gods. Every nation has one focal deity and many have a whole choir of them. Perfectly fine. However we—the Israelites—are to worship our God.

You can say all the great things about this God that you want to say. God created the world; God is the source of all life and of all virtue. And then you place those claims by saying, “for us.” These claims are all part of our story of the world. We understand that they are not part of your story.

That is why the little-known word “monolatry” is so useful. WE worship this God. There is no other God for us. Worshipping any of the other gods—notice the reference to other gods in the commandment—is wrong for us.

Pamela Paul’s point is that the Christian Nationalists are appealing to “Judeo-Christian values” as the norm for the whole nation. The “we” in “we worship this God” is, in their view, all Americans. But if it relies on the Ten Commandments as the source of her notion of monotheism, it will crash of its own weight.

The word that will destroy it is “other.”

And happy independence day. The Declaration of Independence has been voted on and established for two whole days already. Let’s get that sucker signed today.