The Dilettante's Dilemma

Mayor Murphy and half-a-loaf politics

Posted on July 11, 2017 by hessd

This might be the time to take another look at Mayor Murphy. We have all the True Believers and hyperpatriots we really need right now. We have a Congress full of people who have signed pledges of ideological purity and have promised not to compromise with the enemy—ordinarily, that’s the other party but sometimes another faction in your own party—no matter how bad the outcome looks to be. So maybe it’s time to reconsider Mayor Murphy.

I have three goals in mind for this essay. First, obviously, I am going to have to tell you about Mayor Murphy. Second, I am going to pose the question of democratic accountability as Edward C. Banfield has illustrated it. [1] Third, I am going to argue for the crucial necessity, in our time, of the kind of leadership Murphy illustrates.

mayor 1

The character himself is taken from Banfield’s pamphlet. In that little story, he is called “the Mayor,” but, in the words of the fictional journalist who interviewed him, the Mayor was “a little roly-poly fellow, very jolly and red-faced, and a real pro.” That, and the legendary success of Irish politicians in city politics, was enough for me to decide that I might as well name him Murphy. I think this is actually Jack Germond, but his face fits the type perfectly.

The newspaper reporter in this case study is Banfield’s tool for collecting information about all the relevant players in an urban development drama. There are four principal positions [2] and the reporter’s job, as Banfield deploys him, is to show that each of them is inadequate. As a practical matter, however, we, in the Trump era, have only two choices as they bear on these positions. We could choose to adopt one of these four perspectives and go to war with the others. Or we could admit that we need them all and try to find some way of balancing their strengths and weaknesses.

The Problem the Mayor Faces.

Here is the nub of it.

“Well, we might as well talk frankly,” the Mayor said. “The reason I didn’t do it the way it ought to be done was that I just couldn’t. The people wouldn’t stand for it. I would have been out on my ear if I had tried to tear down that slum. I would have been right square in the middle of the worst row you ever saw.

The Mayor had the chance to tear down a slum, bring back the suburbanites who had left, increase the urban tax base, and redevelop the core of the city. Instead, he put the federally funded redevelopment project in an old warehouse district, and tastefully “refurbished” a small fraction of the old slum.

And he did that because “the people” wouldn’t stand for it. When I hear a phrase like that, I wonder the same thing you do. “What people are we talking about?” [3] Murphy has two kinds of people in mind:

those who are making profits from slum properties—“[that includes] some churches too” the Mayor adds,
the working class whites who just moved to the suburbs and don’t want public housing built next door to them—the classic NIMBY position.
Besides that, the Mayor is concerned about the racial unrest these public housing projects might cause and is not eager to put his town through that.

That’s what he means by “the people wouldn’t stand for it.”

The Reporter Pushes Back

mayor 5 This is the “Profiles in Courage” rebuttal. The Mayor has said that he couldn’t “do the right thing” because it would cost him his office. The reporter comes back hard, “Maybe you should have made your fight and taken your licking,”

The Mayor comes back at the reporter just as hard and this rationale is the main reason I wanted to spend some time with him.

“Personally, I don’t look at it that way,” he said. “I don’t have any respect for a politician with such high principles that he can’t get re-elected. In this game you got to do what it takes to win. Either that or let somebody else play in your place. If you’ve got such a sensitive conscience that you can never make any compromises, you’re too good for politics. You owe it to your party to step aside for someone else. After all, the party wants to win, not just make your conscience feel good”.

I don’t know anyone who talks like that, even off the record, and I’m not sure I know anyone who would accept the Mayor’s case as he makes it. The people who populate my circle are more apt to say what the reporter said, viz. do the right thing and whatever happens happens.

I think there are four separate kinds of justification in the Mayor’s response, counting the snarky phrasing as one of the points. The first point, the most general one, is that getting re-elected is his job. Things that get in the way of his doing his job—“high principles” is the example he gives—need to be put aside in the present instance.

The second is that from the standpoint of the party, he is taking up space. The party wants whoever is in the Mayor’s office to do what is necessary to keep the party in control of the office. [3] If he can’t do it, he needs to get out of the way so someone else can. The Mayor owes the party something as well as owing the people something.

The third is that what he has done is “make compromises.” That’s what politics is about. It is not a place for True Believers (remember Eric Hoffer’s book?)—but a place for politicians who can get the best deal available for their supporters. And “the best deal” includes keeping potential disasters at an arm’s length.

The fourth “point”—the snarky one—comprises the language the Mayor chooses to demean the alternatives. “Such high principles” does that; so does “such a sensitive conscience;” and so does “too good for politics.” These are all disqualifications from the Mayor’s perspective. They might be virtues in private life, but they are vices in public life.

I think the Mayor makes a very strong case, but it is all phrased as a response to the reporter. Let me take a shot at phrasing it more generally.

mayor 2 The Mayor is the exemplar of “democratic accountability” as Banfield sees it. There is no way for voters to choose a party (and the party’s nominee) unless the party makes good on its promises. There is no way for the party to make good on its promises unless its officeholders “do the right thing.” Being so committed to the revitalization of downtown that you cause a race riot is not the right thing. Alienating the working class voters in the inner suburbs and turning the Mayor’s office over to the other party is also “not the right thing.”

So the point is that if you believe in “the sovereignty of the people” in any practical way, you need to believe that there is a way for the people to choose a government that will do what needs to be done. Not a party strangled by its own “high principles,” but a party willing to cut the deals that serve its own base. The old notion was that “half a loaf is better than no bread at all,” but, of course, those alternatives require a particular kind of context. That is how voters can affect policy, which is the heart of democratic accountability, which is the mechanism by which the sovereignty of the people means anything at all. It all links together and none of it allows a free-lancing Mayor.

Conclusion

My pitch, above, was that we might need to take all four of the positions and try to balance them. Today’s job was just to present the Mayor’s case as one that ought not be thrown out. Somebody needs to exercise the discipline that keeps the worst from happening and maintains the stability that will allow further steps to be taken later on. I am sure that is what Mayor Murphy thinks he is doing and he may be right.

[1]This was taken from pamphlet called “The Case of the Blighted City.” Banfield, later in mayor 4 his career, became famous for such books as The Unheavenly City, The Unheavenly City Revisited, The Moral Basis of a Backward Society, Here the People Rule, Political Influence, Civility and Citizenship, and City Politics .Here,very early in his career, I think he was just trying to make a buck. This was written in 1959, which accounts for some of the ethnic stereotypes and some old words (“Negro”), but the political principles work just the same way now that they did then. Here is Banfield as a very young academic.
[2] There is an economist, who represents the “free market” perspective, the city engineer, who represents the efficiency standard, and the citizen activist who represents the goals of a well-informed and highly motivated citizen. The mayor is the foil to all three of these.
[3] At some point, I need to say that the relationship between the party and the incumbent presupposed throughout this little study is that the party is dominant and the Mayor is their current representative. The party guarantees the Mayor a majority of the votes in “the organization precincts” of the city by exchanging job for votes. Given this relationship, it is not implausible that the Mayor would defer to the party’s interests.

Posted in Politics | Tagged "doing the right thing, democratic accountability, politics as compromise, politics as principles | Leave a comment

A Wedding, a “Declaration” and an “Address”

Posted on July 5, 2017 by hessd

Written July 4, 2017. Happy Independence Day!

I’d like to look today at Thomas Jefferson’s well-known statement that “all men are created equal.” Some critics have said that this is the height of hypocrisy, coming as it does from a man who owned slaves, but I don’t think so. I think Jefferson was talking about something else entirely.

In this essay, I’d like to say what I think Jefferson was talking about and why I think that. I want to approach this text the way a biblical text might be approached by a careful scholar. We will have to start by keeping in mind who wrote it and to whom and for what purpose. We will give more weight to ways of construing the text that seem in line with Jefferson’s rhetorical needs and less to those that seem tangential.

The Wedding at Cana

Let’s take a simple example to illustrate this technique. In the Gospel of John, Jesus is declaration 3 represented as performing a series of actions that pointed beyond their plain meaning. For that reason, they are not called miracles; they are called “signs.” [1] That means that they point to some meaning beyond themselves. What they have in common is that they look at some major element of Jewish practice—we are going to be looking at the wedding at Cana for our example—and then declare it to be surpassed by the present ministry of Jesus. So each of the signs “means something” in the same way; they point beyond. The meanings themselves differ as the occasions differ.

John tells the story of the first of the signs in Chapter 2: Jesus goes with his family and his disciples to a wedding celebration in the nearby town of Cana. They run out of wine and Jesus provides more. The sommelier is ecstatic about the quality of the new wine, not knowing that a few moments ago it was just water.

It is a story that is much abused because it is easy to care more about what we want to have in the story than in what John needs to have in it. For John’s purposes, the crucial verse is 6, which reads:

There were six stone water jars standing there, meant for the ablutions that are customary among the Jews: each could hold twenty or thirty gallons.

I am going to be arguing, shortly, against several interpretations of Jefferson’s language in the Declaration on the grounds that they are “tangential” as opposed to “central.” They lead away, in other words, from the purpose of the argument. Let me introduce that notion by looking at some of the tangential interpretations of John 2.

It was a miracle. This shows that Jesus was “divine” because he changed water into wine.
It showed his break from family life. He rejects his mother’s request and requests absolutely the rationale she provides for it.
It established a basis for the disciples’ belief in him because he “revealed his glory and his disciples believed in him.” (verse 11b)

declaration 1 I am calling those tangential. I am not arguing that they are mistaken; only that they don’t help John establish the point he is making. John has a use for this story and for this use, the central symbol is the six jars of water. All this water is necessary because “the Jews” [2] needed to ritually purify themselves. John’s point is that because of Jesus, all that water is superfluous. You can do something else with it, since you don’t need it for ritual ablutions. So why not turn it into some really superior wine?

The other interpretations “fly off on a tangent” rather than saying what the sign was and why it was important. That doesn’t make them wrong; it makes them superficial. We can be brought back into line by asking what John was trying to say.

The Declaration of Independence

The passage we are looking at today—the one that has the “all men are created equal” language—is part of a larger argument. I am asking you to give additional weight to interpretations of this much-debated phrase that support the main argument; that are not, in other words, tangential. Like John, Jefferson has a point he is trying to make and we would expect that the language he chooses would help him.

Here is the well known text.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, [3]that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Just before that, Jefferson says;

“…a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

The argument Jefferson is about to make, in other words, is one that will be taken as cogent according to the “opinions of mankind,”—of Great Britain, France and Spain in particular. And he follows this up by building on John Locke’s theories about the social contract, so that he can say that the New World colonies are no longer bound by that contract.

So…what understanding of “all men are created equal” will help him make this point?

Jefferson wants to make the case that all mankind are bound by a “natural” contract to a legitimate authority. That is the condition of mankind in general and Jefferson will make no exceptional claim for the North American colonies. If the sovereign violates his side of the contract—which, according to Jefferson’s extensive accusations, King George III has done—then the colonies are freed from their part of the contract. Any people bound to a legitimate sovereign would be freed from the contract when the king shows himself to be a tyrant, and therefore not a legitimate ruler..

A phrasing that would have established this would have been that any “people” whose sovereign has violated the terms of the contract, is no longer bound by it. This is true of all peoples—it is true of the Dutch and the French and the Spanish, etc.—and it is just as true of the “Americans.”

declaration 4 It is not only the right of these peoples to throw off the yoke of tyranny, but it is their duty to do so. [4] This is true of all peoples—all collections of politically self-conscious people—so it is the general case. Someone arguing against Jefferson would have to argue that although it is true of mankind generally, it is not true of the British colonies in North America; or he would have to argue that Locke’s notions of contract were not valid even in their general sense.

This shows us that understanding Jefferson’s phrase “all men” to refer to “all peoples” moves his argument forward in a direct way. It is central, not tangential, to the argument. By contrast, thinking of “all men” as a comparison of individuals helps Jefferson not at all. There is no good reason, in fact, to think that Jefferson meant that.

The Gettysburg Address

There is every reason, on the other hand, to think that Lincoln meant exactly that. Lincoln made reference to Jefferson’s language in a way that Garry Wills (in an article in The Atlantic) calls “chicanery.” That might seem bold because Wills is a scholar as well as a journalist, but this is what the Chicago Times said at the time.

“The cheek of every American must tingle with shame as he reads the silly flat and dishwattery [sic] remarks of the man who has to be pointed out as the President of the United States. … Is Mr. Lincoln less refined than a savage? … It was a perversion of history so flagrant that the most extended charity cannot view it as otherwise than willful.”

The “perversion of history” the Chicago Times had in mind was Lincoln’s claim that “our fathers brought forth… a new nation… dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.” The Times is complaining, in other words, that Lincoln has willfully misunderstood Jeffersons words—that is the burden of this essay—and has set this misunderstanding out as the fundamental interpretive framework of the Civil War.

Using the textual analysis we have used in the Gospel of John and in the Declaration of Independence, we can ask how this way of construing Jefferson’s claim would have benefitted Lincoln. In Lincoln’s case, it is almost an answer just to ask the question.

declaration 5 Lincoln has no use at all for the hypothetical equality of peoples, equally freed from their allegiance to a tyrant. What he needs is an understanding that puts white people and black people in the same scale—Lincoln had signed the Emancipation Proclamation in January of that year—and finds them to be equal in worth. It would be a violation of “Nature and Nature’s God,” to use Jefferson’s phrase, for one man to own another.

Lincoln could just have said that, of course, but what he really needed was an argument that America has always been about that. That was what our fathers meant when, “four score and seven years ago,” they brought forth a new nation—a nation dedicated to the proposition of equality. Not the equality of peoples, which is what Jefferson needed and what he meant, but the equality of persons, which is what Lincoln is saying the battle at Gettysburg was about.

Editorialists all over the country screamed, if not in the blunt prose of the Chicago Tribune, but people are not scholars. The idea that Jefferson meant something else seemed pale, when what Lincoln meant was so vitally present and so crucially important. What Lincoln said helped people make sense out of their world and the war was going to go on for another two years. What Jefferson meant, “back then,” is something for scholars to fight about after the Confederacy is defeated.

So it helps us, I think, to make the needs of the author central to debates about what he might have meant. For Jefferson, this principle aims “all men” in one direction; for Lincoln, it aims “all men” in another direction. Each of them knew what he was doing and I think we ought to grant them that.

[1] And the first part of John’s gospel, chapters 1:19—12:50, are often called “The Book of Signs.”
[2] John was written at a time of considerable conflict between the followers of Jesus in the Johannine tradition and the Jews of the post-Jerusalem period. As a result, John is at pains to emphasize every difference he can between Jesus and the religious setting in which he was raised. John’s use almost makes it sound as if Jesus was not a Jew, which he was.
[3] A good illustration of “tangential” would be an argument that paused here to say that Lincoln was asserting that man was “created.” It would be even worse to say that Lincoln stressed “created” to deal with Darwin, whose major theoretical work had been published only four years earlier.
[4] Here, Jefferson takes an entirely new step. The rights are specified by Locke’s social contract theory, but when we get to “duties,” we are entering a new territory. To whom would the duty be owed? “The laws of nature and of nature’s God” is pretty thin and that is the only plausible recipient of such a “duty.”

Posted in Biblical Studies, Communication, Political Psychology, ways of knowing, Words | Tagged Jefferson, jesus, Lincoln, textual analysis, The Declaration of Independence, The Gettysburg Address, the wedding at Cana | Leave a comment

There is more to this story

Posted on July 4, 2017 by hessd

Does this illustration remind you of anything? It reminded me of that whirlwind survey of the relationship of Carl and Ellie Fredericksen, with which the movie, Up, begins. They are little children, they are lovers, they are spouses, then he is a widower. That’s where the narrative of Up actually begins; Carl is a dispirited old man, the one in panel 5, still grieving for the loss of his wife. departed 4.jpg

If this picture doesn’t more you in the direction of thinking about life and death, I can’t imagine what would. Take just a moment to notice the trees. [1] And then the people—tallest in panel 3, you notice. The sizes grow toward 3 and recede from it. And look at the relationships. Playing with balloons, then holding hands, then embracing ecstatically, then standing companionably.

And then consider the direction, thinking of this sequence as a narrative. You pass this way but once, the picture says. You go from left to right and then you are done. As much as I love this picture, I am going to have to offer an amendment. It is true that you can’t go from 5 to 1, but you can go from 5 to 2. [2] There are parts of this sequence, in other words, you can do more than once. Everyone who has happily remarried knows that.

In fact, I think I would go so far as to say that “getting to do it again,” i.e. leaving 5 behind and going back to 2 gives you a whole new appreciation for 2. You know, for instance, that it is going to go away and you need to celebrate it while you have it. Or, as it feels at the time, while it has you.

This brings me right up to the lip of a column M. Craig Barnes wrote in the June 21 6 panels 4 issue of The Christian Century. That’s where I am going next, but I want to make one final point about arriving at 2 (after having experienced 5). When you know you can’t keep it, there are several things you could do as a response. You could devalue it. “Because it won’t last, it isn’t really that important.” You could strain to hold onto it. “I want to feel this way for as long as I can.” Or you could just enjoy every second of it, knowing that won’t last.

New friendships, after all, don’t last. Either they go away or they become old friendships. In neither case do they stay what they were and if you are going to enjoy them fully, you need to know that your pleasure in them doesn’t need to be diminished in any way by your knowledge that it won’t last.

Craig Barnes’ column is called “The temporary gift of marriage.” His way into this question is different from mine. He has entered it as a pastor, engaging many couples in counseling before their marriage. I entered it as an unwilling participant when my wife died in 2003. [3] I think those two ways of coming to the question account for our somewhat different understandings of it.

Even so, I agree wholeheartedly with the main inference he draws from the “temporariness” of marriage, which is that it needs to be celebrated and appreciated in every moment. I remember when that occurred to me with some force in 2013 when I wrote “Borrowing Bette.” [4]

So Barnes’ advice to Mike is sage and wonderful advice:

I say give her [Sue, his fiancé] up today. …That way, every morning when you find her next to you, you can rejoice in the temporary gift you can still enjoy.”

Whatever helps Mike rejoice every morning that Sue is next to him in bed is a good thing. Denying that it is important on the grounds that it is not permanent is not helpful. Any marriage, even a very good marriage, is temporary. See Panels 5 and 6. Failing to appreciate it because you are riven with anxiety about losing it is also not helpful. Whatever occasions the rejoicing that she is still there…that is what is helpful.

So I enjoyed the column thoroughly. On the other hand, as I said, I have come at it differently than Barnes did and I think that shows in the two remaining points I want to make.

With reference to the first, Barnes says:

Young people often assume that the funerals for old lovers are not so difficult, as if the weeping person in the first pew is thinking, “Well, we had a good run.” To the contrary, the better the marriage the harder it is at the end.

But that is exactly what Marilyn and I said to each other during our last two years together. We reflected on our time together in a way you really don’t take the time to do when you imagine there will be a lot more time. We looked back on it as a bounded and finite time, like a spectacularly successful Broadway play, and we said that we had had a wonderful “run.” [5]

6 panels The second point is that I don’t have any experience at all of putting my wife in God’s hands. I don’t have that experience with Bette; I did not have it with Marilyn. I want to go back now to the advice to Mike, which I liked so much, and to pick up the part I left out. Here is the whole quotation with the deletion in bold.

“So why do you want to go through all of that?” I asked. “I say give her up today. Give her back to the Creator who made her, sustains her, and to whom she will always belong. Get the grieving over with before it becomes unbearable. Let God hold her. That way, every morning when you find her next to you, you can rejoice in the temporary gift you can still enjoy.” The distinction the poster makes between belonging “to” and belonging “with” is crucial.

I am fine with the theology of the sentiment in the Christian Century column, but I have no experience with it at all. I had the clear sense that Marilyn did not “belong to” me and, as I said in “Borrowing Bette,” I have that sense of Bette now. Maybe the experience—not the doctrine, but the experience—of the loved one “belonging to God” requires more mysticism than I have. Or maybe it is a religious phrasing of an experience to which I have given secular names.

I don’t know which of those it is or whether it is something else entirely; something that has not even occurred to me. But here is what Craig and I both know. You can’t hang onto it and you shouldn’t try. And, rather than trying to prolong it, it is better to invest yourself fully in the appreciation of it today. If Mike and Sue heard that, their time with their pastor was time well spent.

[1] I don’t know why the left side of each is sheared off. They looked like trees that have adapted to a consistent wind from the west to me. It was Bette who noticed that the left edge is as straight as a ruler.
[2] I did that. Panel 2 is a generalized representation of my first date with Bette. We sometimes remember to celebrate our wedding anniversaries, but we always remember to celebrate the anniversary of that first date. And although the relationship did become a 3 and is becoming a 4, it began as a 2. I was at 5 when Marilyn died, but after a year or so, 2 happened to me.
[3] I am not eager for Dr. Barnes to come to the topic the way I did because he is married to my daughter.
[4] I liked the title because those of our friends who read it would roll their eyes, knowing that Bette is a librarian and enjoying the pun; and those who didn’t know that about us would read on innocently.
[5] Marilyn and I were both in our 60s when we reflected on our several decades together. Mike and Sue, the couple in the Christian Century column, were probably in their 20s and this was a first marriage for each of them. Those differences probably help account for my different perspective.

Posted in A life of faith, Getting Old, Words | Tagged be anxious for nothing, carpe diem, in love again, in love with your spouse, one relationship cycle | 2 Comments

The Book of Henry

Posted on July 2, 2017 by hessd

I’d like to invite you to see one of the most thought-provoking movies I have seen in a long time. It is The Book of Henry, directed by Colin Trevarrow. If you are going to see it, you might want to do it before you read any of the reviews. But since you won’t do that, allow me to present some of the more poignant passages from the first four reviews listed in http://www.mrqe.com [1]

Manohia Dargis of the New York Times

A weepie, a thriller, a tragedy, a sub-Spielbergian pastiche, “The Book of Henry” is mostly a tedious mess.

John DeFore for The Hollywood Reporter

The preposterousness of Gregg Hurwitz’s screenplay isn’t enough to throw star Naomi Watts off her game, and the actor’s sincere performance may suffice to keep a segment of the family-film demographic on board, barely.

Susan Wloszczyna for the RogerEbert.com

For much of the film, I focused on the young actors (even Ziegler shows signs of having performing chops beyond her dance skills) and savored the few moments of dry humor—such as when Henry describes his own diagnosis in great detail and in complex medical terms to his shocked brain surgeon. But every book needs an editor, and there really is no upside in threatening to turn Watts into a mommy assassin. That doesn’t just make Henry look stupid, but his movie, too.

James Berardinelli for ReelViews

If you look hard enough, it’s possible to find worthwhile elements in The Book of Henry, an overwrought, tonally inconsistent drama about cancer, death, and child abuse.

OK, that’s what they say. Here’s what I say. I have never seen a movie with the guts to portray social action based on a child’s empathy in the way The Book of Henry does. And they give you no clue at all that they are going to have the chops to do that. At least, I didn’t pick up any clues. So when they drop the bomb—the stunning and satisfying reversal of everything we have come to expect–I ran into it like a glass door. [2]

So of all the themes I could choose from this movie—which I am sure is not going to be in the theaters very long because the critics were very nearly unanimous in their dismissal of it—I am going to choose the strengths and weaknesses of Henry and his mother. You don’t ever see these at the same time, by the way. When Henry is being strong, his mother is being weak.

Plot

I’m going to tell you everything that mattered to me about this movie, so some of you are going to check out now. Tell you what. Go see the movie and come back and read this.

Henry 4 Susan Carpenter (Naomi Watts) is trying to raise two small boys: Henry (Jaeden Lieberher) and Peter (Jacob Tremblay). Peter is a perfectly normal little kid, which means he has to come somehow with the fact that Henry is a genius and a competent manager of events and a superb caregiver and an action-oriented empath. Something is fundamentally wrong with Susan. We never find out what it is, but it keeps her in the dead end job she has as a waitress, it keeps her from writing and illustrating the children’s books, for which she has a real gift. It does not keep her from playing war-themed video games.

She puts her two boys to bed every night in a very loving way, but that’s about the limit of her parenting skills. In terms of managing an adult life, she has no skills at all.

Next door is a beautiful girl, who is in Henry’s class at school, and who lives with her stepfather, who is a beast. He has taken, now, to physical abuse. Maybe sexual abuse too. The bruises and the trips to the emergency room and the suddenly listless attendance at school that are all to familiar to social workers are all part of her life.

Henry has tried everything he can to get the authorities to intervene. Nothing ha Henry 1 s worked. So when he dies suddenly—sorry to just drop it in like that—he leaves behind the red notebook you see him with in the picture. This is the Book of Henry. In it, he argues very powerfully that his mother’s job now is to murder the stepfather, having already fraudulently produced a document that says in the event of his death, he would like Susan Carpenter to have custody of the stepdaughter.

Henry has left nothing to chance. He has figured out where his mother can buy the rifle with the scope and silencer, how she can get rid of the evidence, how she can establish a cast iron alibi. From a technical standpoint, Henry’s performance is even more impressive than anything he achieved during his life.

How to be the mother of a superhero

They don’t tell you that this is what the movie is about, but this is what is was about to me. Susan can’t support the family financially, but Henry can and does. He plays the stock market brilliantly. She can’t commit herself to her own artistic talent. She can’t use her time in any meaningful way. She can’t keep the insurance current or pay the bills. She defers to Henry about all those things and Henry comes up a winner in everything. Henry is, in fact, the adult in the family.

And then he dies. And in the Book, he leaves his mother a lot of really difficult things to do. She gets the evil stepfather to sign a document (any document) from which his signature can be forged. She faces down a corrupt arms salesman with a toughness we did not expect from her. Henry wrote all the lines for her, but she delivers them convincingly. She lays out the ambush and establishes the alibi and then, with the villain in her sights, she says No. In fact, she says in her internal dialogue with Henry, “No. You are just a child.” [3]

She’s right. From here on, I want to pursue three things. Two of them are about Susan Carpenter. The other is about the movie itself—which probably means it is about director, Colin Trevarrow.

Susan 1

It is by following Henry’s posthumous instructions that Susan becomes a fully functioning adult. I know that sounds odd. She lived by Henry’s gifts from the beginning of the film. What we see is Susan as a parasite on Henry’s competence. But in setting out to make his mother a murderer, Henry knows he first has to make her competent. It is by accepting his arguments and following his instructions that Susan acquires a sense of herself. The picture below puts the point to Henry’s instructions: “Never leave things undone.” It also shows (far left) the abused little girl next door.

Henry 2 In fact, the best Susan Line is not “No, you are only a child.” Her best line is just afterward, when she leaves the shelter from which Henry’s ambush should have happened and tells the stepfather that she knows everything about what he has been doing and that she will see to it that he pays the price. The evil stepfather is also the local chief of police, so the likely consequences of saying this are ugly. He waves her off and starts to leave. She orders him to stop and turn around and face her and when he does she gives her best line—the best Susan Line: “I just wanted you to see who you’re up against.” Amazing!

Being up against the person she was before Henry’s death would have been a piece of cake for the Chief. But who is this, speaking his doom with power and certainty?

Susan 2

The movie leads us to believe that Susan is uncaring or weak-willed. We see Henry and Susan and Peter in a grocery store, watching an ill-mannered bully humiliate his wife in public. [4] Henry starts to go over to the couple to “do something.” Susan calls him back. Henry says that what they are seeing is wrong and that “something should be done.” Henry is good at “something.” Susan tells him “It is none of our business.” Which is probably true. It is not true about the abuses going on next door, but no one knows this couple and no overtly violent actions are taken. It could be just the way they fight as husband and wife; something Susan knows a good deal more about than Henry does.

Henry rebukes her, “What if everyone said that?” [5] She has no answer. There is no good answer. A good answer would require context. It would require a consideration of side-effects. It would consider what other tools were available. It would consider the systemic implications on a basis beyond that of individual actors. None of those are what this movie is about. This scene is here to show that Henry is a Moral Superhero as well as a genius and that his mother’s failure to intervene is only another aspect of the hapless life she lives.

Director Trevarrow

I am going to assume that this movie—the one I saw—is built around the point I am about to make. Here’s what it is. I don’t remember ever before seeing a character take Henry’s position, only to see it and him rejected. I have seen “failures to intervene” shown to be cowardly or, at the very least, as failures in empathy. I have seen good-hearted, but ill-considered actions, produce really awful consequences for which the agent can only say, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know it would turn out like that.” Those two lessons sum up my moviegoing experience on this point.

I have never seen an adult like Susan reject the actions urged upon her on the grounds that they are childish. “Extreme empathy,” like nearly everything else called “extreme,” is a good thing. How can it be wrong if it proceeds from the awareness you have of the suffering of another? That’s the film lesson. How can it be right to refuse to intervene when you see someone behaving badly in public? That’s the film lesson.

Until this film.

Susan follows Henry’s wisdom about the checking account and the insurance policies and Henry seems to have the upper hand on the social situations they confront—both the ongoing tragedy next door and the scuffle in the grocery. So we are completely unprepared—even Bette didn’t see it coming—for Susan’s rejection of murder as what she should do AND for her condemning the his urging as childish. “You see things as a child sees them,” she says to Henry in effect, “but I am an adult and I will follow my own wisdom.

Henry 3 I think that to appreciate the power of Susan’s renunciation of Henry’s thinking—not just of the conclusion Henry reached but the simplicity of the route he took in getting to that conclusion—you have to appreciate how attractive intervention is made to seem. The stepfather next door is a brute and the girl who lives with him is completely helpless. The husband at the grocery is a jerk and “deserves what he gets.” That’s the way the narrative is set up. There is no anxious wrestling with the consequences of other possible choices.

None of that. Everything is set up to follow Henry’s plan until his mother says “No.” And grounds that “No” with, “You are just a child.” That’s where the power comes from. The moviegoer is urged to retrospectively reject Henry’s approach, which seemed so appealing at the time, and which we are now asked to see as “Childish.”

I hope that is what Colin Trevarrow had in mind. I really think that is the bone the reviewers are picking at, whatever the particulars are in their reviews. Trevarrow said No to the engaging empathy of an appealing child and he put that rejection in the mouth of a person whose record had not been that attractive up to that point.

[1] The Movie Review Query Engine, which I highly recommend as a source of movie reviews. There were 50+ reviews of this movie on the site.
[2] Pay It Forward, which was a much better movie in most ways, was not able to climb this particular hill. Trevor, the principal character, was deeply empathetic, like Henry, and also a tyrant, like Henry. But Pay It Forward doesn’t say that.
[3] That may seem an odd way to say it, but Henry’s instructions, now that we are down to the actually killing, are no longer represented as pages in a book, as the earlier ones were, but are delivered in Henry’s own voice.
[4] That’s how I read it. I might have gotten some of the details wrong, but I got the scene right.
[5] In Western philosophy, with which Henry might have been thoroughly familiar, we trace that test back to Kant: “act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law,” or “act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a universal law of nature.”

Posted in Movies, Society | Tagged adult wisdom, becoming whole, childish passion, The Book of Henry, the limits of empathy | Leave a comment

Inclusio

Posted on June 30, 2017 by hessd

I have, in mind for today a tactic to help me watch movies. I ran into it in biblical studies, where it is called “inclusio.” [1] I’m going to spend a little time on what this technique is, but let’s look at a movie first. The movie I have in mind is Their Finest, which either a dispiriting tragedy about a woman who leaves her husband, finds a true love, only to see him killed right before her eyes or a bracing tale of a talented woman who persists at her job until her real worth is recognized.

inclusio 3 Both plots are there, but the movie can’t be “about” both of them. What to do? There are two early scenes that offer beginnings to this story. In the first, a [2] loutish husband sends his wife off to make enough money to pay the rent. In the second, a group of British moviegoers watches a truly terrible propaganda movie in a theater. If the last scene matches one or the other of those in the way a second parenthesis “matches” the first, then I would say that inclusio is in play and decide in favor of that theme.

Well it turns out that in the last scene, the writer attends a showing of her movie—the movie the making of which this story has been about—and finds people genuinely moved by it. Ending the movie there tells me something about where the director wanted the movie to begin. That last scene demands that the early propaganda movie, not the husband shipping his wife out to make the rent money, be understood as the first scene.

And that is the use I have in mind for inclusio. So what is inclusio? Most of what I know about it, I know from having biblical scholars use it. They identify instances of it and a plausible reason for it, but they don’t talk about what it is exactly and I will need to do that to use it for my movie watching.

In Matthew 5, there are the famous beatitudes. Two of them—the first one and the last one—end with “for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” The goal of this device, according to the commentators is to identify the material between those references as a single body of material. It is identified as “a unit” by being bracketed with those identical clauses.

Matthew also use the device to bracket the whole Sermon on the Mount and the collection of actions that are grouped into a narrative following the Sermon. That is why, some scholars argue, Matthew 4:23 and 9:35 are nearly identical. Matthew 4:23 reads (in the New Jerusalem Bible):

He went round the whole of Galilee teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing all kinds of disease and illness among the people

And Matthew 9:35:

Jesus made a tour through all the towns and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing all kinds of disease and all kinds of illness.

Nearly identical. They function like the first and second parentheses or the first and second quotation marks. I have been sensitized to that because I spend some time every week scanning documents and very often one of the parentheses makes it into the text, while the other does not. So when I find a left-facing parenthesis, I go back looking for the right-facing one, knowing that all the material between them is one kind of thing. When I identify that material by locating the boundary markers, then I go back and see if I can say what “it” is about.

Here’s a little pitch I found in Wikipedia and which I think is adequate for todays needs (the bold font is in the original).

In biblical studies, inclusio is a literary device based on a concentric principle, also known as bracketing or an envelope structure, which consists of creating a frame by placing similar material at the beginning and end of a section, although whether this material should consist of a word or a phrase, or whether greater amounts of text also qualify, and of what length the frames section should be, are matters of some debate.

I have described how I made some sense out of Their Finest Hour by treating the last scene as if it were the second parenthesis and therefore a clue to the “real” theme of the movie. I was very happy with that experience. On the other hand, it isn’t always a clear as that.

Let’s look at The Lovers with this same technique in mind. [3] Again, all the warnings about spoilers apply. I need to start with the whole film to try to explore how the first relates to the last. In the last scene, Michael (Tracy Letts) and Mary (Debra Winger) are arranging a sexual rendezvous by phone. They manage to seem excited and furtive at the same time, which seems odd to me and will seem odd to you, too, when I give you the background of the relationship. The first scene—which by the inclusio technique ought to me the mirror image— shows Michael trying to comfort a disconsolate woman: “Don’t cry, Lucy” he says. We don’t know who the woman is when we see this scene.

inclusio 5 So let me tell you what the last scene means. Michael and Mary are lovers, which is just a little odd, since they just recently divorced and married other people. The people they married Robert (Aiden Gillen) for Mary and Lucy (Melora Walters) for Michael, were their lovers when they were married to each other.

This is not a movie about loving. This is a movie about cheating. In the middle of their boring and loveless marriage—and two boring and loveless affairs—Michael and Mary suddenly get turned on by each other. This urgent powerful sexual attraction is the only one the movie gives us. Neither of the affairs has anything like the power of this unexpected episode in the lives of Michael and Mary. Michael and Lucy are not like that; Mary and Robert are not like that.

So Michael and Mary divorce, their hot sexual attraction to each other notwithstanding, and marry their “lovers” as they had promised them they would. At which point, they carry on with their own torrid sexual relationship which is now an adultery. To do this, Michael needs to cheat on Lucy in exactly the same way he has been cheating on Mary; Mary needs to cheat on Robert in exactly the same way

So I think I would pick for the “first scene”—the one that serves as the key to understanding the narrative as a whole—the first scene where Michael and Mary are together. They are “together” in the sense that they are both in the screen at the same time, but they are not together in any other way. They are not as close as you would be to someone who lives in your neighborhood and whom you met unexpectedly at a shopping mall. The chance encounter would be warmer, more personal. The Michael and Mary scene shows only the most grudging of recognitions that there is another person in the room.

So that’s my choice for “first scene.” It is the left-facing parenthesis. I like what it says about the last scene, which, however illicit it might be, is also engaged and personal. And if those are the first and last scenes, then I get to say–using or misusing the technique of inclusio– that the movie is “about” the interpersonal relationship of these two people (Michael and Mary) who once had a nerve-dead relationship (though married) and who now have a rich and sexually engaging relationship (though adulterous).

The good news is that this technique offers a way of questioning a thematically complex movie to see what it was “about.” The bad news is that if the movie really won’t tolerate that treatment, people like me might use it anyway, just tucking in the corners as necessary.

[1] I have recently seen it called “inclusion,” but if it is a specific technique—and it is—I would rather give it a distinctive name.
[2] Their Finest is “comedy, drama, romance” according to IMDB. I guess you get to take your pick. The book was called Their Finest Hour and a Half—which I really like as a title—and was directed by Lone Sherfig.
[3] A “comedy” according to IMDB. It was written and directed by Azazel Jacobs.

Posted in Biblical Studies, Movies, Uncategorized | Tagged biblical criticism, film criticism, narrative analysis, The Lovers, Their Finest | Leave a comment

The End of the Enlightenment?

Posted on June 28, 2017 by hessd

What’s the matter with Kansas? wondered Thomas Frank [1]. They don’t seem to vote in favor of the programs and candidates that would benefit them most. I like the way Frank framed the question, but I’d like to take it back a little. How is it that we think we would decide to do the things that are in our best interest? Isn’t that an excessively rational kind of expectation?

Here’s what I’ve been thinking about recently.

In this simple little figure, I want to represent the part of the Western experience of rationality for which we use the name Enlightenment. Societies based on the Enlightenment in one way or another—I have several possibilities in mind—are above the line. The two parts of the arc that are below the line represent our past (to the left) and our future (to the right). They represent, in other words, where we have been and where we are going.

Dismal, isn’t it?

A generous dating of the beginnings of the Enlightenment starts it around 1620 C.E. [2] The Enlightenment is often characterized as the establishment of Reason as the basis for society. But “reason” rather than what? Here, pondering an answer is Thomas Aquinas, who thought “just price” would do it.

Historically, Reason was contrasted with Authority, particularly the authority of the Catholic Church, as an alternative basis for society. I don’t think that is the best set of alternatives for today, but even that set is suggestive. Consider, for instance, that “God says everyone shall be paid enough to live on.” We might even throw in “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox that treads the grain. Deuteronomy 25:4 and several New Testament citations). We would say that this is ordering society on the basis of “revelation,” as the Church understands what God is commanding. That is not rational in any narrow sense of the term. [3] On the other hand, the market system isn’t rational either. “People will be paid whatever employers are forced to pay them to insure for themselves a skilled and stable supply of labor” is not rational. Even in an un-distorted market it would not be rational and no one thinks that the current market for labor is “un-distorted.”

Between those irrationalities—the pre-Enlightenment and the post-Enlightenment, there is a rational path. I am not recommending it because it didn’t work well, but it does have the virtue of rationality. It is the “just price” doctrine, which was once devised and enforced by the church. The Communist Parties of the Soviet Union and China tried the same thing, using social rationality as their argument, and discovered what the Church discovered—nobody knows enough to decide what is “just.”

So in this little parenthetical example, I have placed the inaccessible sources—God on one side and the Market on the other—as bearing the same relation to rational choice. I have put the Church and the Communist Party in the center as examples of rational means of establishing prices. I do not count their failure against them; they did proceed rationally.

There is a way for democracies to proceed that follows this same course. In it, too, there is a brief moment of bright sunlight between a promising dawn (Enlightenment) and a disheartening dusk. Let me describe this period of sunlight briefly.

In order to do it briefly, I will have to caricature the various players. I think it is the only way to proceed, so, with apologies to all, I will grotesquely simplify the last several hundred years of experience.

Making social decisions has nearly always been thought of as a team sport, of which there are two versions. In one, you are a powerful person—a clan chieftain, let’s say—or you are a member of the clan who trusts your chieftain to make the best judgment. This is rational, or could be, on the part of the chieftain, but it is not rational in that same way on your part. Trust in your leader is the virtue on your part. You are part of the social group which operates in the backwash of the leader’s decision and your membership in the social group so affected defines you. If there is a rationale to it, it is that you need to be a member of the team in order to function effectively and being a member of the team means supporting the chieftain’s decisions.

This meets the broader standard of “rationality” you will notice—the one that was met by saying that doing what the Church said God wanted you to do is “rational”—although it does not meet the narrower standard.

Now comes democracy with its “enfranchisement” of “the people.” [4] The notion of “the people” gradually opened out to include everyone over 18 years of age and was further insividualized by the secret ballot. So I go into the polling booth all by myself and I decide all by myself which rulers will serve us all best. Or I decide which rulers would serve me best and the system of democratic equality adds all the personal preferences together and comes up with an approximation.

This is an exercise in “rationality” in the narrow sense. Candidates run for office and make the promises they think they have to make, knowing that they will have to fulfill at least some of them. Voters choose the candidates who make the most plausible promises, knowing that not all of them will be fulfilled. That meets the notion of “rationality” in the narrow sense, as I am arguing the case. [5]

I am considering the election of Donald Trump as a signal that the “day” of Enlightenment is just about over. We are returning—have returned?—to the clan members who support the decisions of the chieftain because that is how we know we are clan members.

I was thinking about this development in May of 2014 when I wrote about Barbara Kingsolver’s book, Flight Behavior. You can see the long version of that post here. The short version appears below. Ovid represents “rationality;” Dellarobia is speaking for the clan members.

Ovid says, “You think…it’s a territory divide? We have sorted ourselves as the calm, educated science believers and the scrappy, hotheaded climate deniers?”
Dellarobia replies, “I’d say the teams get picked, and then the beliefs get handed around.”
“Team camo,” she says, referring to Cub’s team. “We get the right to bear arms and John Deere and the canning jars and tough love and taking care of our own. T
“The other side,” she doesn’t even know what to call the other team but contemporary conservatives call them Limousine Liberals, “wears I don’t know what, something expensive. They get recycling and population control and lattés and as many second chances as anybody wants.”

If what Dellarobia says is a fair characterization of how President Trump was elected, then I think we need to consider the possibility that decision making in large societies simply puts more stress on our rational capacity than it will bear. “Being a member of the team”—Team Camo in Dellarobia’s description—has been important for a long time. Individual rationality has been the mechanism for making social choices for a relatively short time and was not even considered as a possibility before the Enlightenment.

I take the election of President Trump as an indicator of how bad things have gotten. I am thinking of it as analogous to the death of the canary in the coal mine, which is a major event for the canary, but for the miners, it is only an indication that things are not safe. But we have decided, apparently, to vote with our hearts, not our heads. And we have decided not to elect someone who will do what the office requires, but instead to take actions that make us feel good. And we have decided that words and acts—anything, really—that shows how angry we are is all we will require of the person we choose to organize the domestic economy and to deploy the military. That is how the majority that chose Donald Trump was assembled.

Democratic voters who voted for Barack Obama in 2008 because he was black and for Hillary Clinton in 2016 because she was female, fit this same logic perfectly. Not that Obama = black and Clinton = female is the same argument as Trump = angry. The policy consequences, of course, are different, but the way of casting a vote is the same. None of those logics is aimed at an outcome, which is supposed to be the virtue of democratic voting systems.

We have arrived back, in this way of looking at it, at a way of making decisions as clan members. We call them “lifestyle votes” but voting that way is the way you broadcast that you are a member in good standing of this group. And speaking of broadcasting, the little matter of what you call “news” and where you get yours is crucial to group membership. [6]That does not meet the standard of rationality—even as forgiving as I have been about the narrow use of that term.

That is social solidarity voting and it means, so far as decision making in complex societies is concerned, that the sun is setting on the Enlightenment. And after such a promising dawn.

[1] In his book of the same name, published in 2004. The subtitle is “How Conservatives Won the Heart of America.
[2] The Enlightenment is such a complex movement that imagining that “it” started at any particular time is just a useful fiction. Still the ideals that began to be prominent were distinctly different from those before it and, I will argue, with those after it.
[3] It’s probably not a good idea to say that obeying God’s word is not rational, so I pause to distinguish the narrow meaning—following the rules of evidence and of logic—from the broader one.
[4] The quotation marks are richly deserved, of course. “The franchise,” i.e. the right to vote, was limited to white male property owners. No manufacturers, no women, no blacks. But still, the white male property owners are being considered as individual decision makers.
[5] Political scientists have long been enamored of a party-centered model called the “strong party system” in which the party, not the candidate, does the promising. Even political scientists have mostly given up on that, but we did it after the voters refused to be interested in it. We thought it would simplify rational choice for the voters. The voters didn’t like to have their personal preferences rationalized.
[6] I was surprised to see that Fox News was on all the TVs at Dallas/Fort Worth airport. And then I was surprised that I was surprised. The clan in Dallas is defined to include travelers. You could call that Southern Hospitality if you really wanted to.

Posted in Political Psychology, Politics, Society, ways of knowing | Tagged Donald Trump, Enlightenment, Rationality, selfish voting, social voting | Leave a comment

Al Franken: Giant of the Senate

Posted on June 21, 2017 by hessd

I will not be the first to observe that Al Franken—that’s Senator Al Franken to you—is a very funny guy. Bette and I went to hear him here in Portland as part of a Father’s Day extravaganza. [1] Today I would like to reflect a little on the experience.

Franken had me in the palm of his hand from the first word he uttered, which was, franken 5 “Jews.” [2] The interviewer’s first question had to do with Franken’s home town, a suburb of Minneapolis called St. Louis Park. He observed that a lot of other famous and accomplished people came from that same little suburb and asked Franken what was special about it. “Jews,” said Franken. Great line; great timing; great delivery. The whole place went nuts. [3]

I do have a concern about Sen. Franken. It’s a small concern, but he has a liability that I also have, so it has been of abiding interest to me. I’m going to spend an unusual amount of time in this essay on what I see as a vulnerability in a public figure whom I admire a great deal.

A Funny Guy will have Word Problems

Here is the vulnerability. I am not comfortable with the interface between the world as Franken sees it and the words he chooses to describe it. The boundary is floppy, it seems to me; loose. [4]

Franken has spent his whole life being funny. He isn’t funny because he has a big nose or prominent eyes—sight gags that some vaudevillians have used—but because when he hears words, he hears how they might be misunderstood. He hears what words can be used for. To get to non-humorous uses of language, he has to reach through that maze of possibilities, to ignore all those wrong turns. He has to focus on what the speaker probably meant and discard how those words might plausibly be construed. He has to focus on what the word actually does mean in addition to what is could mean. That’s what I think of when I see him work an audience. Certainly, it is what I do when I have to work an audience.

franken 4 I know what it costs me, for example, to walk by the expression “your analysis” pretending that I did not also hear it as “urinalysis.” Or to bypass “gray day eggs,”you know, the really large ones, which were apparently laid on overcast days. Or to ignore the liabilities of the Taipei personality, very common in Taiwan, I understand, but associated with vulnerability to heart attacks. I went to see a new doctor last week, an ENT and he hadn’t read Lord of the Rings and I had to just stuff all the Ent jokes for nearly an hour.

I did it. I almost always do. I almost always reach through that maze of plausible misunderstandings [5] and attend to the meaning the speaker intended. But it costs something. Franken was asked whether it ever hurt to just sit there and not tell a joke he wanted to tell and he admitted it was sometimes excruciating. But even when it isn’t excruciating, it costs something. It is a friction and you pay for it in one coin or another.

Vulnerable to Capture by the Narrative

I think there may also be another effect of this orientation toward words—I know it is true of me and suspect it is also true of Franken—that makes us vulnerable to capture by a more attractive narrative. This is speculation in the case of Franken; confession in the cases of Haidt and me.

Events do not crystalize for us as they occur. We remember them, as everyone does, differently as we think back on them. This is like an internal version of the old “telephone” game. But some people are highly susceptible to the power of narrative. That means that whatever actually happened is subject to being captured by the needs of the narrative. That is, in fact, the problem Haidt wanted to talk about on the page I cited. If you pay attention, you can sense the order of events or the significance of events or the prominence of events shifting around as the narrative needs for them to shift. Foregrounds become backgrounds; insignificant remarks become significant; Event 2 shifts around so that it occurred before Event 1.

franken 3 And most of the time it doesn’t matter at all. It makes a better story that way and all the “facts” that really matter are still what they were. No harm, no foul, we say. And that may be true. In that telling.

But this elasticity of words and meanings—the stock in trade of anyone who hears the possibility of humor in ordinary discrepancies—sets up a friction and friction causes heat and heat causes stress and you never know how a sentence is going to respond to stress.

It is in a context like this one that I heard Sen. Franken tell a story yesterday. He wanted to highlight the willingness of America to be hospitable to immigrants. The good end of this story was a Somali girl who moved to Minnesota, served as a page in the U. S. Senate during her junior year and ended her senior year as “class speaker.” I think he meant valedictorian, but I am not really sure. She sounds really wonderful.

But he needed to set this American experience off against someone else and he chose France. He was talking with the French ambassador to the U. S., he said, and he heard the French ambassador say that you can tell is someone is truly French because that person can track his or her family back to a plot of land in France. I’m pretty sure the ambassador didn’t say that [6], so that raises the question of whether Sen. Franken heard it. I’m not saying he did or didn’t; I’m offering this as an exemplar of the dilemma.

In order to have heard (and to continue to remember that he heard) the ambassador say
that “French-ness” is centrally a commitment to the French project (which is French culture) Franken would have had to settle for an unbalanced and unsatisfying comparison. Imagine a cultural inclusion scale that goes from +5 to —5. The Minnesota-Somali girl’s experience is +5 in a big way. Now Franken is telling a story that requires a —5. He talks to the ambassador and gets (this is my guess) a —2 at best. What does a rhetorician of the Franken school do with that?

I think he will do what Jonathan Haidt says he did. For Haidt, that involved changing the time order of events. For Franken, it involves changing the criterion of French-ness as he heard it described . So Franken’s internal editor changes what the ambassador said so that the story he tells is a perfect +5 versus –5. And as I said, I see this process from the inside because I am either doing it or fighting it every day.

And that’s what makes me uncomfortable about Sen. Franken. He and I share a vulnerability that I know a great deal about.

Having said all that, I liked Sen. Franken a lot. He has a tendency to be candid, which is often a fatal liability for a politician. He has succeeded as a politician by overcoming that tendency and learning to “pivot” as they say. Pivoting means using a sentence fragment to recognize that you have been asked a question, then “pivoting” to the message of the day. Franken made fun of himself for being so bad at it; he credited his staff for his getting better at it. His illustrations of it were hauntingly familiar. “Actually that [whatever the questioner asked about] isn’t what the voters of Minnesota care about. What they really care about is [whatever the message of the day is].”

So he does it. He just makes fun of himself for being forced to do it. And, according to Franken, he doesn’t always remember to do it. An interviewer once asked him if he had ever had a joke that was really funny but that he didn’t dare tell. Franken answered the question by telling the joke that he didn’t dare tell while, I am sure, his staff were jumping up and down trying to get his attention to tell him to shut up.

And he cares about some very little things. He is co-sponsor of a bill (or an amendment to a bill—I have seen it in both forms) that would encourage or require school districts to allow foster children to keep attending the same school, if they want to, even as they move from one foster home to another. This is VERY small potatoes in the Congress, but it would make a lot of difference to a few kids and Sen. Franken has put years of work into that project so far.

I couldn’t dislike the man if I tried and I didn’t try. And the book is really good too.

[1] This was a stop on a book tour for Sen. Franken. He was sponsored by Powell’s Bookstore and sold out in less than 24 hours. The book in Al Franken: Giant of the Senate. Franken is not a giant, of course, which is why the title is funny, but Powell’s actually is a giant.
[2] I got out of his hand later, but it wasn’t because I wanted to.
[3] Portland is known to be a very polite place and I more often hear “Jewish persons” here than “Jews.” Franken may have known that. As funny as he is, he is a man who does his homework.
[4] It is a variant of the flaw Jonathan Haidt described on page 52 of The Righteous Mind. “On February 3, 2007, shortly before lunch, I discovered that I am a chronic liar.” There is nothing wrong with Haidt’s delivery either.
[5] Discrepancy between what a word does mean and what it could mean is the very soul of verbal humor, puns especially.
[6] The best-known French view of “French-ness” is that it is a cultural commitment. The French don’t care what you look like, provided that you sound French and live out the central French cultural commitments. That is, of course, the part of the contract that Muslims stumble over. Laïcité, the word the French use for their commitment to having a secular state, is right up there with liberté, égalité,and fraternité.

Posted in Political Psychology, Politics, ways of knowing, Words | Tagged Al Franken, being funny, learning to pivot, remembering not to be funny, representing Minnesota | Leave a comment

A chair with four legs

Posted on June 14, 2017 by hessd

This morning, I had an “If you build it, he will come” moment. It was in the shower, where I normally hold the team meetings.[1] I don’t want to say I “heard” these words; I’m not entirely sure how I got them. I did understand them immediately, however, and today I’d like to tell you what I understood. [2]

The words, “Jesus is presented to us sitting on a four-legged chair” showed up in my chair 6 mind during this shower. Things like this have happened before, so I wasn’t startled by it and I didn’t rush out of the shower to write it down because I knew I would remember it, like Poincaré’s Conjecture, which came to him as he was getting on a bus and which he didn’t bother to write down until the end of the trip. [3]

So I’ve established that the “mode of delivery” was a little on the odd side. Now I have to tell you that the content of the delivery is pretty ordinary. It matters to me mostly because of the views it excludes—which is not very generous of me—but I also don’t want to deny that it is true about me.

The positive meaning of this statement is that the Jesus to whom we have access in the gospels is presented to us simultaneously in accounts that differ from each other in much more than fact. They differ in intention, in narrative structure, in vocabulary, and in christology. [4] They cannot be reconciled and organized as a single account. [5]

This is bad news for people who want to think of the gospels as journalistic accounts of the life of Jesus. We would think it odd if a major public figure appeared at a well-known public place to give an address on foreign policy and the major national papers disagreed in their accounts of who the figure was, where he or she spoke, and what was said. That would puzzle us because we know what the presuppositions of journalism are and we know that these differences are contradictions. Properly speaking, if one is true, the others cannot be true.

And that is why it is important to understand that the accounts we have—Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John— of the life and ministry of Jesus are not journalistic accounts. They are more like sermons with extensive footnotes. The point of coherence, the notion that each of the gospels is organized around, is that the life of Jesus was a wonderful event, well worth hearing about. In each gospel, the stories Jesus told and the miracles he worked and the arguments he got into are grouped around the writer’s notion of who this Jesus was and why it is important to know about him. Those differ considerably among the authors. That is why the instances they offer in support of the meaning each one holds to be central, don’t fit together. How could they fit together? They support different narratives.

chair 5 Raymond E. Brown, the Catholic scholar whose lectures and books are very likely the ultimate source for whatever it is that happened in my shower this morning, has a different image of this unity and multiplicity. He imagines that the life of Jesus is like a jewel, whose multifaceted beauty cannot really be fully appreciated until it is seen from all sides. One facet is featured as you look at it from this side; another facet when you look at it from another side. (An-other side, not as we often say today, “the” other side.)

I like Brown’s notion that seeing the jewel from different sides allows us to appreciate different elements—different facets—of the complexity. So, to simplify the notion dreadfully, the Jesus that Mark gives us is a facet with its own beauty, while the Jesus that John gives us is another facet and has another kind of beauty. I like the idea that one kind of beauty is not at war with another kind of beauty.

On the other hand, I keep running into people who look at the whole matter very differently and I think that is why the notion of the four-legged chair appealed to me. It makes a very ordinary kind of sense that if a chair is built to have four supports and its stability is designed with that in mind, taking away one of the legs will present a problem. The unwary person is quite likely to fall from such a chair. Even a wary person will have to have pretty good balance and muscle tone and will have to continue to be alert. I’d think that would get tiresome.

So the notion of the gospels as a four-legged chair—a chair that can support the weight of Geneva. Chair, symbol of prohibition of personnel mines and cass the significance of Jesus—is a little more aggressive than Brown’s notion of the multifaceted jewel. When, in Brown’s metaphor, you don’t appreciate all the facets, you miss part of the beauty. When, in Hess’s metaphor, you don’t use all the chair’s legs, you get dumped unceremoniously on the floor. So, this notion that came to me this morning is a notion with, as they say today, “an attitude.” It is a response to something.

So it has, as I said in the beginning, a positive meaning. But then this other side, the part about getting dumped unceremoniously on the floor, is a more negative side. The negative side of this image reflects both the times I have seen the gospel accounts abused and also the times when I have been accused of abusing them.

I don’t want to claim that I am innocent in the matter of this event in this morning’s shower. If I hadn’t wanted it, it would not have come and if I had not delighted in it, I wouldn’t have remembered it. But I did. And I did. And this is the story.

[1] I run over the plan for the day while I’m showering and the various parts of my body who hear they are going to be called on to do something, instruct me on the modifications to the plan they will require. Some days, there is very little similarity between the play I first called and the play we actually run.
[2] I know this sounds uncanny, but that’s mostly because the content of this one was religious. Of the few of these “events” I have experienced, most have not been religious. In fact, the most recent such event was the announcement that a pun I had been working on for most of a year, off in the shadows of my mind, was finished and I could pick it up whenever I had a free moment.
[3] The crucial idea came to him as he was about to get onto a bus, as he relates in Science and Method (1908):”At the moment when I put my foot on the step the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformation that I had used to define the Fuchsian functions were identical with those of non-euclidean geometry.’
[4] And in many other ways. That last difference might seem arcane, but it only means that who Jesus is and how we know about him, are presented differently in the four gospels. That would be an unremarkable thing to say if it were not also true that sometimes scholars seize upon one perspective and seek, by privileging that one, to falsify the others.
[5] Long before I learned that this was a project many centuries old and a project the church had rejected, I tried it myself. I couldn’t do it and my failure was at so many places that I simply concluded that it couldn’t be done. Later, when I read that it was the church’s view that it also shouldn’t be done, I felt better about it.

Posted in Biblical Studies | Tagged contradictory accounts, different accounts, four gospels, interpretive presuppositions, journalistic presuppositions | Leave a comment

Why am I doing this?

Posted on June 9, 2017 by hessd

I would like to thing about two questions today. The first is “WHY am I doing this” The second is “Why am I doing THIS?” I want to think, in other words, about motivation and discernment.

Motivation.

A motivation is what moves you to act. It was simpler once. I remember when we used to be “moved to action.”[1] Then we reasoned that there must be some internal gadget that did the moving so we invented “motive” and then when a “motive” was present, we “had” motivation.

One of the questions that has interested psychology for a long time, and that now interests political psychology, is what that little gadget is. We understand that there can be reasons for acting that do not precisely begin from within oneself. [2] We speak, ordinarily of “intrinsic” motivations if we provide the reward for the action ourselves and “extrinsic” if someone else provides them.

motivation 1 You would think that a rewarded action would be more likely to be repeated than an unrewarded action, and that is certainly true, but how on earth would we know whether an action was rewarded? In the neighborhood where I lived for a long time, there was an old man who walk around with rubber gloves and a plastic bag and picked up trash. It wasn’t his job. He wasn’t paid for it. So far as I know, he wasn’t thanked for it very often. Was his action rewarded?

When we say an action was “rewarding,” we ordinarily refer to intrinsic motivation and when we say “rewarded,” to extrinsic motivation. Odd, isn’t it? So what happens when people who have found a practice—teaching middle school, for instance—to be rewarding, are suddenly” rewarded” for it? According to every study I have ever seen of it, performance declines.

Since all the studies seem to find the same thing, I’m going to skip over what happens and move right to why it happens. My favorite explanation is that the answer to the question, “Why am I doing this?” which is a crucially important question, gets muddled. Before I was “rewarded” for it, I “found it rewarding.” The answer to the crucial question was, “Because I like it” or “Because I value it” of even, “Because it has to be done and I am here.”

I ask the question and derive the answer from the nature of the work or the presence in my mind of the meaning and value I find in the work. You might think that just adding extrinsic motivation to internal motivation would make it twice as strong, but it doesn’t. It is more like dumping one radio signal on top of another, so that you can’t be sure just what you are hearing.

Discernment

I am going to use “discernment” in the modern sense of being able to tell what to do or what is worth doing. [3] Interestingly, “discernment” is a fact that can be deduced from outcomes. It would be nice if it were like the cartoon light bulb that turns on when you get a good idea (and sometimes it is) the that is not a reliable indicator.

Generations of experiments in social science laboratories have demonstrated that students can learn “how to win at this game” with no idea at all of what they are doing that works. You can watch a student get better and better at playing this game; the scores go up and up. But when you bring a new player in and ask the experiences player to explain “his technique,” it turns out that he has no idea.

Well…he does have an idea. That is why he can continue to achieve the high scores that eluded him when he was new to the game. But he doesn’t have access to that idea. It raises the question of what we mean by “he” or “she” if the player “has” the understanding in one sense and not in the other. She can do it consistently, but she doesn’t know what she is doing.

Let’s go again to the question of where this learning comes from. Imagine that the experimenter is guiding the student’s choices so that she makes better choices than she would otherwise. The early scores would no doubt be higher, but that isn’t why they play the game. The process by which the student is rewarded for the choices she makes—they are shown to be correct and therefore, in terms of the game, valuable—needs to be immediate and internal. The student will not learn, otherwise, “what works;” only how to get high scores.

If discernment—separating the good from the bad—is going to become a stable strength, the determination of what is good has to have some relationship with the choice she has made. Following the (very good) advice of the experimenter will not do this, of course. The glow of getting it right and the sting of getting it wrong will be mediated by the experimenter and therefore denied to the student.

So intrinsic motivation is better than extrinsic motivation over the long haul and unmediated feedback—deriving directly and immediately from the task at hand—is better than mediated feedback. Again, over the long haul.

Adulthood [5]

So what does this mean for the staple virtues of our time, like “good advice.” Good advice is mother’s milk. It’s exactly the right thing at the beginning. And just as a baby needs to be [4] weaned from breast milk, so he will need, later to be “weaned” from baby food, and, still later, from junk food.

Every one of these transitions will benefit from the intervention of someone who knows when (there is the harvest metaphor underlying discernment) to wean the young person away, and to what. You can “import” motivation and good judgment from an external source at the beginning and that is, without question, the best way to do it.

But then you need to get rid of the external source because when the immediate feedback that intrinsic motivation and personal discernment require and only impeded by external sources. Really? What about really really good advice? Really really good advice is terrific at the beginning. It can provide the reason (motive) for doing something that would not be there otherwise; it can provide the judgment, (discernment) that would not be there otherwise. But then it needs to stop so that the immediate (that means “not mediated”) process can proceed.

The crucial question will always be, “Why am I doing this?” and the right answer will always be “Because I am choosing to.” And then, “Is this the best thing to do?” and the right answer will always be, “I feel really good about it and it works.”

Both of those answers require that the effects of the actions be clearly perceived and judged by the agent, the person acting, not the counselor or the parent or the coach. Doing it because the coach wants you to id not going to work over the long run. It is mother’s milk. And doing what the coach tells you to do is not going to work over the long run. Only the agent can tell in the immediate situation what works and what does not. That too is mother’s milk.

So pay attention to how it feels and to what works. Then do that. When you are doing it wrong, you will know.

[1] Very straightforward. The Latin motus (look familiar?) is the past participle of the verb movere, “to move.”
[2] Although it isn’t as clear as one might think. When someone says, “Do this or I will whip you,” you could say that the whipping is an external motivation or you could say that the desire to avoid a whipping is an internal motivation. As complicated as it might be, it doesn’t seem to confuse us.
[3]The Latin is dis = apart and cernere, “to separate,” so fundamentally, to be able to tell one thing from another. It’s a harvest metaphor, so if your mind runs to separating wheat from tares, you are thinking along some very old lines. Also you were raised reading the King James Bible.
[4] The curious thing about the word wean is the missing prefix. The Middle English awenian, “to wean away” gives the whole picture. The root wenian means to desire, to attain, to be satisfied.” The the privative prefix a- means “away.” And when we are not actually talking about weaning a child, we often say “to wean away,” including both parts of the idea. It means to be satisfied “with something else.”
[5] I’m just playing. We get the English “adult” because it is the past participle of adolescere, “to grow.” And it might seem that in turning to growth, we are moving away from the weaning metaphor. But not really. It turns out that adolescere, “to grow,” is derived from alescere,” to grow up” and that alescere is a development of alere, “to nourish.”So adult, the past participle, marks the end of the nourishment process and is still very much a part of the weaning metaphor.

Posted in Getting Old, Living My Life, ways of knowing, Words | Tagged discernment, extrinsic motivation, motivation, the end of good advice | Leave a comment

A woman’s right to choose her own feminism

Posted on June 7, 2017 by hessd

In Season 3, Episode 14 of The West Wing (Night Five), a temp named Celia Walton is working in the White House. Celia is what I think I am going to call a Hillary Clinton “kind” of feminist [1] She objects both to the way Ainsley Hayes looks—she was called back to the White House from a concert—and to the way Sam Seaborn comments on Ainsley’s outfit. Here’s the way the crucial part of the exchange goes.

Ainsley Hayes: I don’t think whatever sexuality I may have diminishes my power. I think it enhances it.
Celia Walton: And what kind of feminism do you call that?
Ainsley Hayes: My kind.

Celia takes for granted that “feminism” comes in several kinds and that she will recognize them when she sees them played out. Nothing she has seen from Ainsley that night identifies what kind of feminist she is. That’s why Celia is puzzled and I am sure Ainsley’s answer doesn’t help her because it not only doesn’t answer the question as asked, but undercuts the basis of the question entirely. Ainsley looks a lot better than this in this episode; this is the closest I could come. You get the idea.

This longer excerpt gives you the setting of the two line exchange I used as an introduction.

Celia Walton: If you’re willing to let your sexuality diminish your power.
Ainsley Hayes: I’m sorry?
Celia Walton: I said, I’m surprised you’re willing to let your sexuality diminish your power.
Ainsley Hayes: I don’t even know what that means.
Celia Walton: I think you do.
Ainsley Hayes: And I think you think I’m made out of candy glass, Celia. If somebody says something that offends you, tell them. But all women don’t have to think alike.
Celia Walton: I didn’t say they did. And when someone said something that offended me, I did say so.
Ainsley Hayes: I like it when the guys tease me. It’s an inadvertent show of respect I’m on the team, and I don’t mind it when it gets sexual. And you know what? I like sex.
Charlie Young: Hello!
Ainsley Hayes: I don’t think whatever sexuality I may have diminishes my power. I think it enhances it.
Celia Walton: And what kind of feminism do you call that?
Ainsley Hayes: My kind.

feminism 1 “My kind” is an answer that rejects the notion that there are a few recognizable kinds. And that brings us to the question of how important “kinds” of feminism are. For that, let me take you to Emily Bazelon’s conversations with women in Pennsylvania after Hillary had lost the 2016 presidential election and had, in fact, lost the whole category of “white women.”

This excerpt is a part of Bazelon’s conversation with Palma Frable of Moscow, Pennsylvania and her daughters, Abigail and Lauren. I added to this last January with a post entitled “Hillary and the “Women’s Vote” in Pennsylvania,” which you can also see here if you would like more context. Here is part of Bazelon’s summary:

Frable also admires Ivanka Trump and felt she was one of the campaign’s “top three assets.” She sees Ivanka as a role model for Abigail in her own entrepreneurial interests. It’s not Hillary’s “Gloria Steinem feminism,” as Frable put it, that she values. It’s Ivanka’s sleek version of female success, which commentators have labeled “commodity feminism” — branding to sell products.

Right away we see the “kinds of feminism” emerge. Moving past the efforts of the suffragettes, who made “women” a constituency worth a politician’s time, the first modern feminism is associated with Gloria Steinem. Pamela Frable associates Hillary’s public stance, both what she says and how she represents herself, with Steinem’s “kind” of feminism and she doesn’t like it.

feminism 2 But there is another kind of feminism, which Bazelon says commentators have labeled “commodity feminism.” [2] I have more commonly heard it called “lipstick feminism.” It is another “kind” and it is the kind Pamela Frable likes. She seems to have put Hillary Clinton up against Ivanka Trump as alternative visions of where this nation might go and to have chosen Ivanka.

Once again, Ainsley’s designation “my kind of feminism” loses out.

But there is another reason I called Celia a “Hillary Clinton kind of feminist” and it shows up in another part of Bazelon’s conversation with the Frables.

All of this [Trump’s wish list] matters far more to her than anything Trump said about women or was accused of doing to them. Anyway, given Bill Clinton’s history, how can Hillary complain?

“I have disrespect for Hillary for not doing more for herself, not standing up for herself with him,” Frable said. “That’s more damaging than goofball words Trump came up with.”

However Frable thinks of feminism—and this is not the lipstick variety–Hillary’s behavior does not represent it. How can a woman who put up with a philandering husband expect the support of women? Hillary did not “stand up for herself,” as Frable sees it, and thus is no model for herself and her daughters.

And besides that:

“I’ve been paid the same as men, I’ve managed men,” Frable said. “I’ve not had any trouble working with men.”

So as Frable sees it, she has passed the feminism test that Hillary failed.

Two Dilemmas

This, finally leaves us with two dilemmas. Hillary’s legacy is the first one. She could be seen as an early feminist; a pioneer feminist. She faced challenges no woman of her era had ever faced. She used the earlier successes of the feminist movement as her guide and added new experiences and new successes to it. Frable might very well have said of her experience as a workplace feminist, “I have succeeded because I stand on the shoulders of the giants of the movement who preceded me and who made my success possible.” She could have, but she didn’t. She saw Hillary’s kind of feminism—Celia Mason’s kind of feminism—as outdated and unnecessary. Especially when an attractive new “kind” of feminism (Ivanka’s kind) is available.

The second dilemma brings us back to Ainsley Hayes. She too is “post-Hillary.” Not only that, she has rejected Ivanka’s “kind” of feminism and every other “kind” of feminism. Ainsley might have said that the day when there are recognized kinds of feminism has passed. That might have been necessary for the pioneers, but today, every woman is free to invent her own approach and free, also, to call that approach, “feminism.”

The word, in other words, ceases to have meaning in the sense that it identifies some behaviors as falling within the category and others as falling outside. For Ainsley, the day of “categories” is over.

So what does that mean for feminism? It’s hard to say. If feminism allows women to feminism 3 recognize some women as feminist and others not and also to claim women who are pursuing that understanding of feminism as sisters, then it will continue to be powerful as a movement. “We” will refer to “other women who are feminist in the same way I am.” There is no reason to refer to the approach of other women as “wrong,” only as misguided. “We,” my sisters and I, can show them a better way. I think feminism as a movement will require distinctions that function in that way. If the women in this picture call each other “sister,” the movement model will continue to be powerful.

Or, alternatively, maybe Ainsley is right. The day of “kinds” of feminism is over. Every woman today is the beneficiary of feminists who have gone before her; she is also free to choose her own path and to call that path “feminism.” There are no more “kinds.” If I call it feminism, it is feminism. That makes Ainsley’s answer to Celia the perfect post-movement answer: “What kind? My kind.”

There is nothing about this imagined end to the “kinds” of feminism that means women cannot continue to work for broad economically defined goals, like equal pay and generous maternity leave, the kind that does not sacrifice the post-maternity career. But these are economic goals and the goals that are dealt with in these examples are cultural goals; they are goals that raise questions of personal style.

If that is where we are, then “a woman’s right to choose” has grown to include her right to choose her own kind of feminism.

[1] There’s a good reason for the quotation marks around “kind” and also for introducing Hillary Clinton into the discussion.
[2] I’ve never heard the term. I get it. It’s a play on the Marxist notion of “commodity fetishism,” which makes it both a clever play on words and a refutation by obscure reference, which is certainly the easiest kind of refutation.
[3] Ginger, (Kim Webster)who is seated at the desk next to Celia tosses in, “I call it stiletto feminism,” which is even more provocative.

Posted in Communication, Politics, Sustainability | Tagged feminism as a movement, feminism as a personal style, lipstick feminism, The West Wing, workplace feminism | Leave a comment