Where on earth did we get the idea that we ought to be unbiased? Or that we could possibly be unbiased? I have never understood that. [1]
There was a time, not all that long ago, when everyone in the village was expected to hold the same views, particularly about “us” and “them.” Now we are beginning to formulate a standard that holds the each of us should have perceptions and lines of reasoning and conclusions of fact and value that are based on extensive study. That is, in fact, what being “unbiased” would require.
How on earth did we come to such a place?
Emily Badger has a really interesting column in the New York Times for October 6 in which she refers to the term “implicit bias” as “one of the newest chew toys in the presidential campaign.” At the level of actual discourse—Ms. Badger was referring specifically to the Vice Presidential debate between Mike Pense and Tim Kaine—here is what all the chewing comes down to. Kaine represents black voters who have everything to gain by pointing out the extent of the bias against them. Pense represents white voters who are sick and tired of being accused of having biases they don’t even know about.
I find both of those views entirely understandable, but then, I can afford to. I am not seeking the allegiance of any voters at all. I would really like to see a long-running and profitable public discourse on the status of ethnic and racial minorities or of sexual minorities (of the two most common gender statuses, that would be men) or of old people or fat people.
Shall we start the conversation by determining just who is biased? Here’s a comment from Emily Badger’s column.
The science of how this submerged bias affects your actions is still a work in progress; studies have found a link between the biases and specific actions in some situations but not others. But because this bias is a function of universal human psychology, researchers say, we all experience it — and you can’t exactly get “rid” of it.
So I’m biased and you’re biased. How shall we begin the conversation? Could we, possibly, begin with the biases that have effects on the kind of conversation we could have? Let’s see. I think you are African-American and therefore stupid and lazy. You think I am a white person and therefore a racist and a bigot. Does either of those sound to you like a good place to begin a conversation. I would say a conversation that starts there is doomed before it even begins.
We could, I suppose, compare how harmful our biases/prejudices are. “Your biases are more harmful than mine! No, how can you say that? You know that yours are more harmful than mine!”
I wrote that exchange to sound silly and I think you will have to agree with me—it 
does sound silly. On the other hand, it is a step forward—a step toward an enduring public conversation—better, that is, than debating whether we have any biases or not. This silly exchange focuses on what the effects of the biases are, which is a conversation worth having, rather than whether there are biases.
Interpersonal Conversation
So here’s an idea that would work really well in interpersonal conversation. I am going to attempt to ignore all the biases you hold, including some that you treasure, if they do not impede the path of the conversation. You will do the same. There is now a subset of all our biases that will need to be recognized and dealt with—likely a very small subset.
Maybe an example would help. You and I want to have a conversation on how to counteract every influence on academic performance at our local grade school except interest and ability, Kids who like learning (in any of the modes it is offered at our local school) will do better than those who do not. Fine. Kids who are really smart will do better than those who are not. Fine.
But gender, race, class, and family status should not be allowed to constrain the natural expression of any child’s ability and interest. So we work together on how those can be accomplished. And in our conversation, my food preferences (and your attitude toward my food preferences) and your taste in clothes (and my attitude toward your taste in clothes) and my authoritarian attitude toward raising my own children (and your attitude toward my parental style) will all be set aside.
Needless to say, the fact that you are a right-leaning Trump supporter and I am a left-leaning Sanders supporter, now sagging back onto the Clinton team, will also be set aside.
That’s my program for interpersonal conversations where there is a common goal. In the setting I just described, there are two common goals: one of ends and one of means. The substantive goal is that we change the educational climate of the local grade school which your children and my children attend. The procedural goal is to have the kind of conversation that enables us to settle on a program of action and pur
sue it over time.
Conversation in Groups
Conversations in groups can follow this same sensible protocol PROVIDED that there is agreement on the ends and the means AND there is someone in the group who will call attention to the inevitable violations of the norms the group agreed to honor.
That would be an astounding achievement in the current political and social climate, but you may think I have lobbed a softball up toward the place just so I could hit it out of the park. So let me rephrase. You are asking the participants in this group to collaborate with evil people—under ordinary circumstances, “the enemy”— and to be complicit in conversations full of lies and slurs and half-truths and massive ignorance of the facts.
Yes, that is what I am asking. And further, I am asking that this be done over and over, at conversation after conversation, until the job we share is done. That means that just “enduring” these conversations is not going to be enough. If participating in one such conversation uses up 10% of your reserve, how many of those do you think you can take before you bail out. [Hint: the correct answer is considerably less that 10: you don’t bail out when you have used up your resources but when you see that you are going to.]
Debates between Parties
Only one step to go. Let’s go back to Mike Pense and Tim Kaine. Let’s imagine that neither of them is a bigot or a nanny—neither one who believes in vile racial stereotypes or one who takes it on himself to punish lapses in political correctness. They could still say exactly what they said in the debate because they are trying to mobilize indentifiable sets of voters. It’s their job.?
But what if it were not their job? What if they refused? What if they made a show of their amiable collegiality before and after the show? What is the principals—Trump and Clinton—did not require their vice presidential candidates to serve as rabble rousers? What if the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee refused to condone that kind of behavior by their candidates?
I’m not proposing any of those. I’m just trying to illustrate how far we would have to go to affect the partisan morality plays that fill up our campaigns.
Or what if the rabble-rousing we left to marginal parties. Let me offer a homely example. Car dealerships in Oregon are now advertising that their sales force are salaried. What does that mean? It means that they are not required to strong-arm customers in order to make a living. They can afford to be courteous and knowledgeable because they are going to receive their salaries whether they sell you any cars or not. [2] This is an opportunity to demean the dealerships when a customer walking onto the sales floor is treated like a piece of raw meat.
Following that same logic—you can call it snobishness if you like—the major parties, currently the Democrats and the Republicans, will identify themselves as the “salaries sales force” kind of organization. We argue for the superiority of our candidates and our platforms, but we don’t treat our opponents like enemies and we don’t appeal to the base instincts of the rabble. They do—those “fringe parties”—but we don’t.
Or imagine that the standard of behavior of major league baseball players was very high and those of minor leaguers notably lower. When the minor league player is called up to the majors, he does not want to flaunt his ignorance and naiveté. He wants to behave “the way we do it at this level.” He wants to look like the guys he knows belong in the big leagues.
So the fringe parties—whether Marxist or environmental or nutritional or xenophobic—are free to bash and slash, thereby identifying themselves and their programs as bush league. [3] But if they were to aspire to serious social standing, if they wanted a place at the table, they would have to act like the grownups.
Please note that is proposing these changes, I am not asking for anyone to be better than they are. I am not asking for a raising of moral standards or a return to the public probity we associate with a bygone era. I am asking only that people continue to do what works. I am proposing a social setting in which “what works” is less noxious to the participants and less toxic to the republic.
So…I’ll tell you what. Indulge in all the implicit biases you have and all the finger-pointing you like so much—provided that it does not impede the job you and your colleagues are trying to do. If there isn’t anything you are trying to do, you might want to ask why that is.
[1] The Latin verb plicare is the source of all this. It means “to fold,” so implicit biases are “folded in” and explicit biases are “folded out” where everyone can see them.
[2] I am not describing here how sales people who don’t sell cars are treated by their employers. I am describing the appeal of that way of pitching the company.
[3] No offense is intended toward either of the Presidents Bush or to the recent Republican candidate for his party’s nomination.
the whole “old life” construct. My practice used to be to hit Starbucks twice each morning. I would drive over around 5:30 or 6:00. I’d get coffee for Bette and me and come home to write things like this. Then I would walk over (about a mile) intending to get there about 7:30 for the meeting of “the Northwest Corner Caucus.” [2] And then the other caucus participants and I would do whatever happened that morning.
I was a senior in high school. She was kind of a “practice girl friend” for me and I was a practice boy friend for her. It was a new and exciting kind of relationship but as the school year was winding down, we both looked at the relationship and realized it wasn’t going anywhere. It was a generous and thoughtful and collegial decision and we were both satisfied with it.
Now, I do not have any girlfriends west of the river. I brought the only girlfriend I have with me to the east side. But I have a lot of friends over there and being with them has reminded me of my first girlfriend and the fading of a relationship with no future. If it is really true, as I learned in high school, that what we call “the experience of a relationship” is in fact part experience and part expectation, then I should have imagined that when you remove the expectation part, the experience part would start to lose its color and snap. [4]
distinction from a Portland guide book. It opened with a completely straight-faced joke about a man who came to Portland and got a job and worked hard and saved his money and eventually was able to move to the west side. He married and started a family and then began again to save money so he “could bring his mother across.” First I said, they didn’t really mean that and I read it again. I decided that was exactly what they meant. Then I said, “Ooooh. I want to live in a city that thinks that is as funny as I do.”
This morning, I had a truly wonderful experience at the Multnomah County Courthouse. I was summoned to be part of the pool of potential jurors and I gave them from 8:00 a.m until 11:30 a.m. so I was available to be chosen. I was not chosen, so I will be back at the courthouse at 8:00 tomorrow morning to give them a second chance.
But this is different. “Women have a better chance…” and this is a good thing. Really? Let’s see: “Men have less of a chance…” and that is a good thing? Really? The first statement is a commonplace. [1] I have never heard the second said out loud although the meaning is exactly the same. This rooting for the comparative success of women is a new thing, it seems to me. Maybe the sports metaphor comes easily to mind because of the Olympic games, but I hear people rooting for the success of women in the same spirit that they root for the success of American athletes generally.
Granted. Some will say it is easy to mistake hoping for advances for women for hoping for the disproportionate success of women—and, of course, the failure of men. I know it is an easy mistake to make and I don’t hold bad feelings against Judge Walker for making it. At the same time, the standard itself is sexist and reprehensible and I think it deserves to be vilified. Judge Walker does not, but the position that he, perhaps inadvertently, advanced, does deserve it.
contains [1] objects or events. When your seventh son brings home a girl he is interested in, you do not say, “Wow! What’s going on?” You say “I think these are getting easier,” which places this event into the category “all such events,” meaning what it was like when the six older brothers brought their girl friends home. I don’t have seven sons, myself, but I can speak for these parents. It is extremely difficult to take this seventh iteration on its own terms! Your mind goes to the category and to this event, the seventh girl friend, as an instance of the category. It isn’t fair to the son or to the girlfriend, but first sons have special difficulties too and I think it all evens out.
So they did it for a few days and then the man said that times were a little tough economically and although they were doing everything they promised, he would be able to pay them only 75 cents each from now on. It’s still free money. Later, he reduced it further. When he got down to a dime for each kid, there was a rebellion. “What! You expect us to come clear over here to insult you for a measly dime? We’re done with this deal. Goodbye!” The old ugly man waved goodbye as cheerfully as he had done everything else and smiled quietly to himself.
At the crucial moment in such transitions—I am just about to tell you one of mine—the question, “What is happening here?” or sometimes “Why am I doing this?” gets asked. When it gets a different answer than the one you were expecting, you get the feeling Wiley Coyote gets when he runs off a cliff and doesn’t start falling until he notices that he isn’t standing on anything anymore. Here was my Wiley Coyote moment last week and here’s the way I described it when it happened.
eally has surprised me. There is no relationship I can see between how constraining a disability is and how the person responds to it. I write on our “front porch,” just outside the door of our apartment. The front edge of this picture is a hallway and I sit at one of the tables. And most of the time I am writing, people are walking by–some with the aid of walkers or canes.
Everyone who knows what blood glucose is would wonder what you were planning on using it for. That is not the question that comes first to mind to people who know what an estate is. But today, I find myself wondering why that is. I think that is a really good question to ask about estates: “What are you going to use it for?”
stream of stories. I see “children” in their fifties and sixties (and older) seriously encumbered by the process of caring for an aged parent. [1] This parent could have invested in his or her (“”her,” usually) own care by moving to a CCRC, but she did not. She relies, instead, on the daily services of her children to enable her to keep living the kind of life she is used to.
Buying time like that is what you would get, in this scenario, for using the estate rather than saving it for the kids. But there needs to be a way to say that in less than a page and a half. If it were possible to say, “I would like to estate to you the freedom to use our time together as we choose,” that would do the job. No one will say that.
He says of his opposite number, the American spy, “I do like him, you know. One can’t help it.” The opposite number in Hopscotch is Miles Kendrick, played by Walter Matthau. Like Yaskov, I just don’t seem to be able to help liking Nicholas Kristof. He writes a lot of things I find fault with (like his September 4 column) but it never occurs to me not to like him. And I liked his father a great deal. [1]
There really isn’t any way to categorize Jesus simply unless the purpose of the categorization is to turn him into a tool of some sort. The bad guys in this column “weaponize” Jesus as part of their social program: opposed to women, opposed to the poor, wholly without compassion. The good guys in this column “instrumentalize” (I know “weaponize” would keep the parallel, but I just can’t manage it.) Jesus as part of their social program: attentive to the needs of the poor, responsive to the feminism of our time, global in its compassion for those who are suffering. I like the second set of programs much better than the first, but from a Christian standpoint, they are both idolatry
McLaren continues with a series of examples of beliefs as distractions—actually, he considers only that they will be distractions. He touches on whether biblical miracles are true as a distraction and, of course they can be. They can also be an invitation to modern Christians to place themselves in the 1st Century as receivers of the good news about Jesus. He contrasts questioning whether Jesus actually healed a leper (that’s the miracle) with focusing on Jesus’s “outreach to the most stigmatized of outcasts.”
So let’s think back a little. Historically, the Democratic party integrated these two agendas within the party. There was a liberal northern wing, which ran the executive branch, and a conservative southern wing which ran (controlled) the legislative branch. Then there was a Republican legislative party that aligned itself with the liberals sometimes, mostly on supporting business and with the conservatives sometimes, especially on social issues. That blue band across the south, normally including Tennessee, was the natural home of the “Austin” branch of the Democratic party. Notice that everything else has changed a great deal.
Well, it is different in one way. Sen. Dirksen was famous for “delivering” the Republican vote in the Senate on the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That wasn’t what he wanted to do at the beginning of the process, but he stayed with it and kept talking to his R colleagues and at the end, delivered the votes.
And once I got that far, I saw that it was the old familiar Tragedy of the Commons and the rest of this essay is an attempt to play our the metaphor. As first formulated, it is about cows. There is a common grazing area which is big enough to sustain grazing by so many cows; not more. But the arithmetic underlying this arrangement is seductive. If Farmer A adds just one more cow to the commons, he uses only a small fraction of the grazing area and he keeps all the profit that extra cow brings for himself. Pretty good deal.
This point tends to be lost on an oversensitive member of the discussion because he thinks that racism is a really important issue. Crossing the line in talking about race is a serious offense. And this guy probably thinks that when someone else shows the sensitivity about sexism that he himself shows about racism, that he is being “oversensitive” or maybe even pretending to be offended to regain the initiative. I know that makes this “oversensitive to race issues” guy look stupid, but he isn’t using all his intelligence if he thinks that only one issue makes people angry.
Furthermore, what I find very hard to remember when I am the one being insulted or demeaned is that we are all beneficiaries of the commons. If the commons represent a style of discussion, not a topic to be discussed, then every kind of discussion is taxed by oversensitivity. We don’t talk about supporting and sustaining families the way we might if the commons had not been so shrunk from overuse. We don’t talk about poverty and homelessness the way we might. We don’t talk about American imperialism the way we might, or the frightening over-expansion of executive power under President Obama.
My solution is taking one for the team. [3] We’re having our discussion about The War of the Roses and someone makes a remark that bears on the race, religion, national origin, or sexual preference of someone else. The potential victim notes it (no problem there) decides it is not the opening gun of a bombardment, and lets it pass without comment.
